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Saturn's Rings Are FALLING Into the Planet: Cassini, 2017 #Shorts

Oct 27, 2026

Pack: 26 - Saturn's Rings Are FALLING Into the Planet Cassini, 2017

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Saturn's rings are raining into the planet, and NASA's Cassini spacecraft measured it up close in 2017.

• Ultraviolet sunlight and micrometeoroid strikes charge icy ring grains, and Saturn's gravity pulls them along magnetic field lines into the upper atmosphere: "ring rain" (NASA, Dec 2018).
• In its 2017 Grand Finale, Cassini made 22 orbits through the gap between the rings and the planet and found up to 10,000 kg of ring material falling every second (NASA/JPL, Oct 2018).
• At the ring-rain rate alone the rings would be gone in about 300 million years; adding Cassini's measured infall, under 100 million (NASA, Dec 2018). Ring rain drains an Olympic pool's worth of water every half hour.
• Their age is debated: Cassini gravity data point to 10–100 million years (Iess et al., Science, 2019); Cassini dust data cap it at a few hundred million (Kempf et al., 2023); a 2024 model says they could be as old as Saturn (Hyodo et al., Nature Geoscience).

Are we lucky to live while Saturn still has rings? Full story in our Saturn documentary.

Sources

• NASA Science, "NASA Research Reveals Saturn is Losing Its Rings at 'Worst-Case-Scenario' Rate" (Dec 17, 2018)
• NASA/JPL, "Groundbreaking Science Emerges from Ultra-Close Orbits of Saturn" (Oct 4, 2018)
• NASA Science, "NASA's Cassini Data Show Saturn's Rings Relatively New" (Jan 17, 2019)
• Kempf et al., Science Advances (2023)
• Hyodo, Genda & Madeira, Nature Geoscience (Dec 16, 2024)

Images

• "Saturn during Equinox" (July 2008), NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, public domain
• "Backlit Saturn from Cassini Orbiter 2007 May 9" (PIA08388), NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, public domain
• "PIA21439 - Cassini Grand Finale Dive (Illustration)" (2017), NASA/JPL-Caltech, public domain
• "PIA21628 - B Ring fine structure in color" (July 2017), NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, public domain
• "PIA17218 – A Farewell to Saturn" (Sept 13, 2017), NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, public domain