In article ,
Craig Fink wrote:
A planetary probe should be able to fly in and sample Saturn's ring material
and analysis it and/or return a sample to Earth. The relative velocity
between the probe and ring material would be almost zero if the probe is
in-plane near circular.

Has anyone proposed or is working on a Saturn Ring Sample mission?

Assuming you had a big enough and complex enough vehicle
you could get to the neighborhood of Saturn and get the
vehicle into the same orbit as ring particles, getting the
piece of the ring particle might not be too difficult.

But it would have to be analyzed there. Returning it
to Earth in usable shape might be difficult for many
reasons, one of them being that the current estimate
of what the ring particles are come up with some sort
of water-ammonia ice, and even returning an empty
probe requires more energy than will be available.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558