Sounds of Saturn

In honor of Halloween, the JPL folks have put up a feature called “The Eerie, Bizarre Sounds of the Saturnian System”. You can listen to one of them here. The graphic at right is a spectragraph over time — a “sonic fingerprint” that’s interesting to examine as you listen to the sound…

From the Cassini-Huygens web site:

Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of Saturn’s radio emissions.

The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing that show an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. In this example, it appears as though the three rising tones are launched from the more slowly varying narrowband emission near the bottom of this display. If this is the case, it represents a very complicated interaction between waves in Saturn’s radio source region, but one which has also been observed at Earth.

Time on this recording has been compressed such that 13 seconds corresponds to 27 seconds. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 260.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

I think these guys are having way too much fun <smile>. But they deserve it — the Cassini-Huygens mission is already a spectacular success…