Dr. Tiscareno studies Saturn's Rings as an associate of the Cassini Imaging Team. He is an expert on the waves that propagate through the rings and on the irregularly-shaped scalloped edges of ring gaps, which he uses to infer properties of the disk and the bodies that perturb it. He led the discovery of hundreds of small moonlets embedded in the rings, seen indirectly by the "propeller"-shaped disturbance they create in the surrounding ring material. Drawing on the analogy between moonlets embedded in Saturn's rings, and proto-planets embedded in the disk of our early solar system, Tiscareno is currently studying in more detatil the "propeller"-shaped structure to learn about the underlying disk-moonlet interactions, and is tracking the propellers through time to study their orbital evolution.
Dr. Tiscareno is more generally interested in the many applications of orbital and rotational dynamics. His recent work includes a study of the unusual rotation of moons such as Saturn's Epimetheus, and the long-term evolution of resonant orbits in the Kuiper Belt.
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