Last night I got my first new measurement of Saturn’s rings from Cassini in almost a year. A couple of weeks ago I posted a prediction about what that measurement would look like. Here are the results. The black curve (new observation) shows excellent agreement with the prediction, particularly in the outer half of the A ring (right half of the plot). There is some disagreement in the inner half of the ring. This may be due to inaccuracies in the model. Another possibility has to do with instrument calibration. That gets down to the nitty-gritty work. Overall, this observation confirms our model by the good match with the prediction.
Looks like a good match…I love it when data lines up with predicted curves…so satisfying!