Saturn’s ring is a vinyl record.

The planet is the lathe, the dust cloud is the lacquer, 82 moons the 82 needles, cutting ripples through space and time, perpetually writing, erasing, and re-writing interwoven gravity across 4.5 billion years of time and 170,000 miles of space.

The Cassini - Huygens probe gave us a stunningly detailed look at Saturn’s rings. It offered unprecedented insights into how this delicate machine of gravity functions. Among some of its most remarkable findings is how the moons play an integral role in the forming of the rings, and how their gravitational ripples constantly reshape the ring materials around them in each and every orbit. 

The sound experiment was made possible by Cassini mission data published on the NASA Planetary Data System. In particular, Radius-Longitude ISS F-Ring Mosaics on the outer-most F ring, carved by the gravity of Prometheus (inner moon) and Pandora (outer moon) - Multiple images from a single observation of the F ring are reprojected into radius-longitude space and stitched together into a single mosaic covering the entire range of F ring co-rotating longitude captured by the observation. Essentially, a mosaic of 107 images showing 255° (about 70%) of the F Ring as it would appear if straightened out, showing the kinked primary strand and the spiral secondary strand. The geometry extracted from the images was then mapped temporally across 60 seconds, and audible frequencies between 50Hz and 1000Hz.