Saturn's Roche Division

Close up of the Roche Division. Visible from the bottom left to the upper right, the A Ring with the Encke Gap and the Keeler Gap, Atlas in the center, and the F Ring

Image Credit:

NASA

 

The Roche Division is the space between the A Ring and the F Ring in the ring system of Saturn.  Despite sharing the name with the Roche limit of Saturn and being near it, it is not named for the limit, but actually is named for Edouard Roche.

Like the Cassini Division, it is not empty, but contains material similar to the D Ring, E Ring, and F Ring, but very sparsely distributed.

The Cassini spacecraft discovered to small ringlets in the division, both near the orbits of a moon. One ringlet shares an orbit with the moon Atlas and the other is close to the orbit of Prometheus, which will be discussed in the next blog post.