cool! Now we get to watch as the rings reform themselves and if the “shephard” moonlets have anything to do with it
If it actually hit a bunch of material in the rings, it seems like it could take years for the F ring and neighboring rings to settle down again. It’s going to be very cool to see what astronomers have to say about it over the next few weeks.
Myself, being a reckless shoot-from-the-hip amateur astronomer wannabe, I think it’s a comet (it certainly looks like one) and may not have hit anything as it passed through the rings. Naturally, the tail of the comet points right at the Sun. So we know exactly where the Sun is positioned with respect to the scene and, no surprise, the shadow of the comet on the ring system is in perfect alignment with the tail. I’m having trouble figuring out whether that would necessarily be the case for a comet passing through the ring system at an arbitrary angle with sunshine coming in from any other artibrary angle... BUT, I know that for a non-comet blasting through the rings, generating a spray of ring material that it had collided with, we wouldn’t necessarily expect to see the path of the spray line up with the shadow.