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Sound Clip: Saturn’s Radio Emissions by Cassini-Huygens Mission
Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions from Saturn.
The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth’s auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.
Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the instrument team’s home page, http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/cassini/ .
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Iowa
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by newecho and newecho, Kieron James. Kieron James said: Saturn’s Radio Emissions #SoundisArt http://tinyurl.com/ye23g5b [...]
In 2003 I published a solo CD in which you can find a track called Radio Saturn:
but we can maybe find a connection with strong imagination 
The sound have not the power of a planet as it is raw solo saxophone only
Can listen to radio saturn on http://virb.com/hbbk/audio/albums/57905
Mindblowing! I could listen to this as a veeeerrry long loop. — Imagine the first man on Saturn, will he/she pick this up instead of FM-radio?
http://planets.net/2009/11/10/saturns-radio-emissions-sound-is-art/
A little spooky but really amazing!
I’m still not convinced Saturn is a planet though it sounds convincing enough.
you wouldn’t pick this up on FM radio on saturn or otherwise. as the article states, 73 seconds correspond to 27 minutes of audio, and i quess the factor of 44 refers to pitch bend (not sure), meaning that they’d be pretty much unreproducable by normal speakers, without heavy tinkering trough computer. even if you could get it audible on the speakers – and provided you’d still be able to hear the tone from the speakers – the pitch bend would take so long that it would sound pretty much like a constant noise.
that, and the fact that FM radio gets it’s name from “Frequency Modulated”; which means that there is a oscilator in your radio that modulates the radio waves at a sertain frequency corresponding to the radio channel you’re listening to.
but you would be able to do pretty much the same thing, if you’d record a long time of background radio emissions. though i’d assume recording on the surface (if you could survive on the planet surface that is) would yield far more sudden changes, as the probe recorded the noise from the entire planet (or the entire pole, if it was focused on the pole), where as you’d only record a small fragment of the sky.