Swarming The Rings of Saturn With Tiny Probes [NIAC 2026]

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https://www.patreon.com/universetoday/posts/165844581/

🟣 Guest: Dr. Mike Rubenstein
https://robotics.northwestern.edu/

📜 Actively Steerable Femtosat Constellations for In-situ Exploration of Saturn’s Rings, Atmosphere, and Magnetosphere
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/niac/actively-steerable-femtosat-constellations-for-in-situ-exploration-of-saturns-rings-atmosphere-and-magnetosphere/

👉 All 2026 NIAC Selections
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/niac/niac-studies/niac-2026-selections/

Saturn's rings are dense. Sending one flagship probe through them makes no sense. It'll most probably be lost. But sending a swarm of small cheap probes does. Even if a lot of them won't survive, you're still getting lots of data. This is exactly what this NIAC project is proposing.

00:00 Intro
01:22 Observing Saturn's rings
05:21 A swarm of satellites
21:56 Current obsessions
23:36 Final thoughts


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