An evolving view of Saturn's dynamic rings.

We review our understanding of Saturn's rings after nearly 6 years of observations by the Cassini spacecraft. Saturn's rings are composed mostly of water ice but also contain an undetermined reddish contaminant. The rings exhibit a range of structure across many spatial scales; some of this involves the interplay of the fluid nature and the self-gravity of innumerable orbiting centimeter- to meter-sized particles, and the effects of several peripheral and embedded moonlets, but much remains unexplained. A few aspects of ring structure change on time scales as short as days. It remains unclear whether the vigorous evolutionary processes to which the rings are subject imply a much younger age than that of the solar system. Processes on view at Saturn have parallels in circumstellar disks.

Cassini discovers a kinematic spiral ring around Saturn.

Since the time of the Voyager flybys of Saturn in 1980-1981, Saturn's eccentric F ring has been known to be accompanied on either side by faint strands of material. New Cassini observations show that these strands, initially interpreted as concentric ring segments, are in fact connected and form a single one-arm trailing spiral winding at least three times around Saturn. The spiral rotates around Saturn with the orbital motion of its constituent particles. This structure is likely the result of differential orbital motion stretching an initial cloud of particles scattered from the dense core of the F ring. Different scenarios of formation, implying ringlet-satellite interactions, are explored. A recently discovered moon candidate, S/2004 S6, is on an orbit that crosses the F-ring core at the intersection of the spiral with the ring, which suggests a dynamical connection between S/2004 S6 and the spiral.