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The Cassini spacecraft science team is taking advantage of equinox sunlight on Saturn to study its gossamer rings. But they’re finding the rings aren’t quite as delicate as they expected.

“We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we’ve come across walls more than two miles high,” Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging chief at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, told NASA’s press office. “Isn’t that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction.”

Right: A 400-metre diameter moonlet in Saturn’s B ring casts a 41-kilometre shadow during the August 2009 equinox.

Below: A vertical structure in Saturn’s F ring may indicate an object that penetrated the ring and dragged debris with it.

Porco, who recently won the The Huntington Library’s Science Writer Fellowship for 2010 [pdf], which she’ll use to write a book on the Cassini mission, was also featured in a New York Times profile this week.

Photos: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute