Scientists can now say, to within one Earth mile, where Saturn is in space, which will come in handy for future studies on the solar system.
According to BBC News, the new discovery was made possible thanks to observations from the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. Spread about Hawaii and the Virgin Islands, then 10-part Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) put together the final calculations.
Lead researcher on the project Dayton Jones, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and his team presented their findings at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
"Because of [the VLBA's] large geographic extent, it has the ability to make very high resolution images - but for this study, the critical thing it can do is measure very precise angles," he said in a news conference. "This is very good, and far better than previous techniques have been able to provide.
"Getting better orbits... particularly for the two planets that dominate the dynamics of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, improves the basis of the entire ephemeris."
Sending spacecraft to orbit and collect data from a planet from above requires a certain level of precision and the less margin of error the better. What's more, scientists already know that each planet's orbit around the sun affects one another.
"And all the other bodies in the solar system affect the Earth's orbit, so you really want to have that all put together in a nice consistent system," Jones told BBC News. "If you want to send a spacecraft to orbit one of the moons of Saturn or Jupiter, you really do want to know what that trajectory has to be, to get there at the same time as the planets do."
