Highlights in planetary rings

There is a rich phenomenology within the planetary rings surrounding the giant planets, most of it discovered by the Voyagers during their historic tours of t he outer solar system in the 1980s. In the last decade, there have been two detailed IUGG reviews of planetary rings. Cuzzi [1983] covered the time period from 1979–1983 which included the Pioneer 11 encounter with Saturn (1979), the Voyager 1 and 2 encounters with Jupiter (1979) and with Saturn (1980 and 1981). Nicholson and Dones [1991] reviewed the developments in the field between 1984 and 1991, a period of time which included the Voyager 2 Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989) encounters. (References t o additional reviews of planetary rings and related fields can be found in Nicholson and Dones [1991].) Rather than being comprehensive in nature, this review will concentrate on only those areas of ring research in which particularly promising developments have occurred in the last half decade.