What's New! ...at the PDS Rings Node (1995)

December 22, 1995

The Voyager image catalog now contains the complete list of Saturn images, including those not yet available on CDROM.


December 21, 1995

Mark Showalter has developed the "Julian Toolkit" for manipulating dates and times in various formats. It includes routines for conversions between Universal Time (UTC), Atomic Time (TAI), and Ephemeris Time (ET). It also performs conversions between calendar dates and Julian dates, and interprets or formats dates and times in a variety of styles. Routines are written in C and can be accessed by programs written in either C or FORTRAN.

You can download the TAR'ed routines for several different platforms.


December 11, 1995

New versions of the Saturn Viewer and Moon Tracker tools are now available on the Saturn ring plane crossing page. They have been updated using new ephemerides and should be substantially more accurate for Mimas, Enceladus and Prometheus. The previous versions of these tools remain available but the new ones are now the defaults.


November 28, 1995

A new revised ephemeris for Saturn and its eight classical satellites is available. It was updated by Robert Jacobson of JPL using 1995 measurements, and should be much more accurate for Mimas and Enceladus.


November 9, 1995

The Rings Node Catalog is now on-line. Its first component is a catalog of the Voyager images available on CDROMs.


November 7, 1995

Phil Nicholson has prepared a new set of eclipse reappearance predictions for Prometheus, Pandora, Janus and Epimetheus. Predictions have been updated based on results of the May and August ring plane crossings.


August 10, 1995

Mark Showalter has developed the "Kepler Toolkit" for performing calculations related to orbital motion around an oblate planet. Routines can be used to predict satellite locations and to calculate arbitrary resonance locations in planetary rings.

You can download the TAR'ed routines for several different platforms.


August 10, 1995

Ken Bollinger has developed a site for "Web Resources". Everything you need to get started. Whether it's for learning how to write HTML or configuring your Server, it (eventually) will be here. It has all the Icons, Buttons, Bullets and Lines you could want (Plus a site where you can build your own!). Enjoy!


May 3, 1995

A new link in the "What's New" section of our home page connects to the Saturn ring plane crossing page at JPL.


March 14, 1995

A new Moon Tracker tool is now available on the Saturn ring plane crossing page. It generates plots of the motion of Saturn's moons over a user-specified time interval.


March 7, 1995

An ephemeris for Saturn's moon Pan is now available on the Saturn ring plane crossing page. Also, Pan has been added to the Saturn viewer.


March 1, 1995

New logos for the Rings Node and for the 1995/6 Saturn ring plane crossing are on-line. They were designed by Maren Cooke of MIT and Mark Showalter.

Also, a revised version of the ring plane crossing diagram is on-line on the ring plane crossing page. This one is more accurate than the previous version.

Finally, the Saturn viewer now provides an option for displaying background stars. There is also now a shorter entry form.


February 24, 1995

The Saturn viewer has been modified. It now displays the time at the top of each diagram generated. It also offers a new "annotations" option, which labels each moon on the diagram.


February 15, 1995

The Imaging CDROM listing has been updated to include CD's 22 and 23.


February 7, 1995

The "General Voyager 1 and 2 Information" has been updated to include the JPL press releases of all the Voyager encounters.

Many "Figures" have been added to all the Voyager 1 and 2 "30 Day Reports" from Science Magazine.


February 5, 1995

The Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Voyager pages all have "Alternate Web Sites" added to their respective pages.


January 31, 1995

Information about the Voyager images and how to order them is on-line.


January 17, 1995

The Saturn viewer is on-line. It renders diagrams of Saturn, its moons and rings during the upcoming ring plane crossings.


January 5, 1995

Text excerpts from the Voyager science teams' 30-day reports are now on-line for Saturn. However, most of the figures are not yet available.


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