Saturn’s Rings Slice The Skull Off Its Moon, Titan.

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I never knew this, but all of Saturn’s moons and rings orbit the planet on the same plane. It happens through yet another wonder of our glorious universal laws-thingies.

Bad Astronomy:

Due to a quirk of physics (aha!) all the moons and rings of Saturn orbit the big planet in the same plane. There are two reasons for this: one is that they almost all formed out of the same disk of material orbiting the Sun. As the pieces clumped together, they naturally all stuck to the same plane. A second reason is that any object that tries to stray out of that plane (or that gets captured by Saturn like some of its bizarre outer moons) feels a torque on it, forcing it back down. That torque is provided by Saturn itself, which has tides that tend to circularize and flatten all the orbits of the moons, confining them to the planet’s equatorial plane. The physics of this is a little hairy, but  I do have a simplified explanation using the Earth and Moon as an example.

The Cassini spacecraft orbits Saturn, but it has rockets on board that can push it around into any orbit the engineers and scientists back home want. That usually means a tilted path, plunging it through the equatorial plane twice each orbit. When it is precisely in that plane it sees the rings edge-on, and if the geometry is right it can spot one or more moons.

In this case, the gigantic moon Titan was in its sights, and the angle was such that the rings slice right across it.

Scalp the moon, bring me it’s soul!