"You see the outside ring is a bit over 160,000 miles across, and it
revolves in less than eleven hours. In other words we might find the
ring a sort of celestial maelstrom, and if we once got into the whirl,
and Saturn exerted his full pull on us, we might become a satellite,
too, and go on swinging round with the rest for a good bit of eternity."
"Very well then," she said, "of course we don't want to do anything of
that sort, but there's something else I think we could do," she went on,
taking up a copy of Proctor's "Saturn and its System," which she had
been reading just after breakfast. "You see those rings are, all
together, about 10,000 miles broad; there's a gap of about 1,700 miles
between the big dark one and the middle bright one, and it's nearly
10,000 miles from the edge of the bright ring to the surface of Saturn.
Now why shouldn't we get in between the inner ring and the planet? If
Proctor was right and the rings are made of tiny satellites and there
are myriads of them, of course they'll pull up while Saturn pulls down.
In fact Flammarion says somewhere that along Saturn's equator there is
no weight at all."
"Quite possible," replied Redgrave, "and, if you like, we'll go and
prove it. Of course, if the _Astronef_ weighs absolutely nothing between
Saturn and the rings, we can easily get away.
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