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  • Saturn Moon Formation Seen in New Images

    Astronomers this week were excited to announce that new images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft may show a how a new, icy moon could form within Saturn‘s rings.

    The images show what NASA is describing as “disturbances” on the edge of Saturn’s outermost ring. The standout feature of these disturbances is an area significantly brighter than the surrounding ring. The bright spot is around 750 miles long. The findings were published today in the journal Icarus.

    “We have not seen anything like this before,” said Carl Murray, lead author of the report and an Astronomer at Queen Mary University of London. “We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right.”

    Unfortunately, this disturbance is unlikely to become a new moon. Astronomers do not predict that it will grow larger. Instead, researchers are looking to the phenomena as a possible clue to how Saturn’s current moons may have formed.

    The object causing the large ring disturbance, nicknamed “Peggy” by astronomers, is estimated to be only half a mile in diameter – far to small to be seen using Cassini’s cameras. Astronomers believe that Saturn’s current rings, as spectacular as they are, do not have enough material to support the development of a new moon. Saturn’s current moons are believed to have formed from even larger rings that existed in the planet’s past.

    “The theory holds that Saturn long ago had a much more massive ring system capable of giving birth to larger moons,” said Murray. “As the moons formed near the edge, they depleted the rings and evolved, so the ones that formed earliest are the largest and the farthest out.”

    The Cassini probe is scheduled to make a close pass of Saturn’s outermost ring in 2016. At that time astronomers will be able to study Peggy more closely, something that may not be possible at any point in the future.

    Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

  • New Saturn North Pole Storm Images Released

    New Saturn North Pole Storm Images Released

    NASA today released new images of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft. The images are the highest-ever resolution photos of the planet’s north pole.

    The images depict the so-called “hexagon” jet stream located near the north pole of Saturn. The formation is so-named because of its six sides. The hexagon is a gigantic storm covering the pole that can reach wind speeds of up to 150 meters per second. The images depict a top-down view of Saturn and show the full 30,000 kilometer diameter of the storm. As a comparison, the diameter of earth is only around 12,700 kilometers.

    “The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology. “A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades — and who knows — maybe centuries.”

    Images of the hexagon taken in the visible light spectrum were unveiled by NASA earlier this year. The images being taken are now possible due to Saturn passing its equinox in 2009.

    These newest images were taken using the Cassini probe’s high-resolution cameras over the course of 10 hours. Researchers were then able to analyze the photos using false color, allowing them to pick out the different substances that make up the giant storm. They observed smaller vortices within the storm that spin the opposite direction as the main storm, as well as differences in the concentration of haze particles within the storm.

    “Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University. “The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth’s Antarctic ozone hole.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton)

  • Saturn Moon Titan Has Something Earth Needs

    Saturn Moon Titan Has Something Earth Needs

    Our solar system seems to be shrinking. Planning on moving to Mars? The idea sounded crazy in the past; however, recent strides show that this may become a reality within the near future.

    Now evidence has surfaced that a moon within our solar system has more in common with Earth than what may have been originally thought.

    One of Saturn’s moons, Titan, was recently discovered to contain a necessary component in the creation of plastic used on Earth. While orbiting Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft noted that Titan’s atmosphere contains propylene, which is an ingredient in developing plastic needed on earth. Car bumpers, storage containers, eating utensils, and many other items all require propylene.

    The discovery was made by NASA prior to the government shutdown through Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) instrument. The spacecraft has been in Saturn’s orbit since 2004, and will continue to orbit the planet until 2017.

    Michael Flasar, who serves as the principal CIRS investigator, released a statement where he explained why the discovery was difficult to make, proving the competency of the program.

    “This measurement was very difficult to make because propylene’s weak signature is crowded by related chemicals with much stronger signals. This success boosts our confidence that we will find still more chemicals long hidden in Titan’s atmosphere,” Michael Flaser said.

    The following is a NASA radar image that Cassini captured depicting two moons “kissing” each other on the surface of Titan. The title of the image is referred to as “Titan’s Kissing Lakes” to substantiate the obvious depiction.

    Conor Nixon, who is a NASA planetary scientist, served as the lead author of the research paper that explained this discovery of Titan’s atmosphere. He shared the news with the September 30th issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    “This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene. That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom, that’s polypropylene,” Conor Nixon said.

    The following video provides more information about Saturn’s moon, Titan, and the connection between Titan’s atmosphere and that of earth’s atmosphere.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqyR_NfTw9s

    [Images Via Wikimedia Commons/ Titan’s Globe Image Kissing Lakes Image Both Courtesy of NASA]

  • Propylene Found on Saturn’s Moon Titan

    Propylene Found on Saturn’s Moon Titan

    Of all the Saturnian moons examined by NASA’s Cassini probe, Titan is consistently the most interesting. Researchers have observed large lakes on the moon’s surface, a vortex that formed rapidly, possible hydrocarbon sand deposits, and what appears to be a solid ice shell.

    This week, NASA further revealed the mysteries of Titan, announcing that propylene has been found on the moon’s surface. The hydrocarbon was detected in Titan’s lower atmosphere by the Cassini spacecraft’s infrared spectrometer.

    “This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene,” said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of a paper on the discovery published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom – that’s polypropylene.”

    Though this discovery marks the first plastic ingredient to be found outside the Earth, astronomers have known for decades that Titan contains many hydrocarbons. Methane is abundant in Titan’s atmosphere, and sunlight breaks the gas down into other hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane, both of which have been confirmed on Titan in the past.

    “I am always excited when scientists discover a molecule that has never been observed before in an atmosphere,” said Scott Edgington, deputy project scientist for Cassini at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . “This new piece of the puzzle will provide an additional test of how well we understand the chemical zoo that makes up Titan’s atmosphere.”

    (Image courtesy NASA)

  • Massive Storm Kicked Up Water Ice On Saturn

    Massive Storm Kicked Up Water Ice On Saturn

    Saturn has been known to erupt in storms from time to time. Though not as active as Jupiter, the weather in Saturn’s atmosphere has been known to form large swirling vortexes. Now, in one of the largest storms ever observed on the planet, astronomers have spotted signs of water ice.

    The storm in question occurred on Saturn in 2010, and is the same one researchers determined was so large that it wrapped around the planet and ran into itself. New research on the storm shows that the storm was so large that it brought water ice from deep in the planet’s atmosphere to the surface. The observations were made by NASA’s Cassini probe, which observed the storm with infrared instruments. They have been published this week in the journal Icarus.

    “We think this huge thunderstorm is driving these cloud particles upward, sort of like a volcano bringing up material from the depths and making it visible from outside the atmosphere,” said Lawrence Sromovsky, lead author of the paper and a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The upper haze is so optically thick that it is only in the stormy regions where the haze is penetrated by powerful updrafts that you can see evidence for the ammonia ice and the water ice. Those storm particles have an infrared color signature that is very different from the haze particles in the surrounding atmosphere.”

    Sromovsky and his colleagues found signatures for water and ammonia ice among the Cassini data, as well as a third unconfirmed substance they believe to be ammonium hydrosulfide. This supports current theories about Saturn’s atmosphere, which scientists believe to be composed of distinct layers. Water clouds are believed to reside at a layer more than 100 miles deep within Saturn. The observed ice could have come from this layer, frozen as it was churned upward by the storm.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

  • Saturn’s Moon Titan May Have Solid Ice Shell

    Saturn’s Moon Titan May Have Solid Ice Shell

    Saturn’s Moon Titan has consistently been one of the most fascinating objects in our solar system. In just the past two years, astronomers have found large bodies of water on the moon, seen the satellite’s weather form a seasonal vortex, and detected hydrocarbon sand on Titan’s surface.

    This week, researchers announced that odd gravitational measurements of Titan’s surface taken by the Cassini spacecraft suggest that the moon’s ice shell is rigid. Moreover, bumps in the surface of the shell could indicate large roots of ice that extend deep into the planet’s oceans. This hypothesis was based on the fact that areas of higher topography on Titan’s shell were found to have lower gravity readings, suggesting that they may cover large ice columns that would be less dense than the surrounding water.

    “Normally, if you fly over a mountain, you expect to see an increase in gravity due to the extra mass of the mountain,” said Francis Nimmo, a co-author of a paper on the findings published in the journal Nature. “On Titan, when you fly over a mountain, the gravity gets lower. That’s a very odd observation.”

    Though the ice column explanation is suitable for Titan’s gravity readings, it could conflict with other observations of the moon. According to NASA, the hypothesis would mean a lack of ice volcanoes, which other researchers have suggested exist on Titan. Also, a fixed ice shell would suggest no plate tectonic action on the moon’s suface.

    “It’s like a big beach ball under the ice sheet pushing up on it, and the only way to keep it submerged is if the ice sheet is strong,” said Douglas Hemingway, lead author of the paper and a planetary scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “If large roots under the ice shell are the explanation, this means that Titan’s ice shell must have a very thick rigid layer.”

    (Image courtesy ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

  • Cassini Saturn Photo Great Opportunity For “Cosmic Awareness”

    Cassini spacecraft is set to capture a rare photo of Earth today as it sits to one side of Saturn’s rings, and Carolyn Porco, the leader of Cassini’s imaging team, says the picture is a great opportunity for us to stop for a moment and think about the enormity of what’s happening all around us.

    “I just thought it would be a fantastic moment, a fantastic opportunity, if we could do it again, do it right, make sure the pictures are the correct camera settings, correct filters, all that stuff, do it right and let everybody know in advance so this could become a kind of interplanetary salute between robot and maker. Think about where we are, think about life on planet Earth, how incredibly marvelous it is, think about your own existence, just have a moment of cosmic self awareness,” Porco said.

    Porco worked with Carl Sagan in 1990 to create a photo of Earth on Voyager 1, and that picture became known as the “pale blue dot” by Sagan, who marveled at how the home of where everyone we have ever known or will know could seem so small and insignificant. This new photo will accomplish much of that same feeling, but on a different scale. As Cassini circles Saturn, it will have access to a view of Earth that no human has ever seen: a distant, tiny planet some 898 million miles away. The photo will be part of a mosaic of pictures taken by the spacecraft as it moves around the ringed planet.

    The photo shoot will begin around 5:30 Eastern time tonight, and pictures of Earth and the moon should be available within the next week. Scientists say it will take a few weeks to gather all the other photos into the mosaic, however.

  • In Saturn’s Rings Might Be The Most Beautiful Film Ever Made

    The advent of special effects and CG has ensured that a lot of the movies made today are at least visually pleasing. As beautiful as these films have become, however, they still have nothing on nature.

    In Saturn’s Rings is a new film coming out next year that takes viewers on a journey through one of the most beautiful areas of our solar system. The most amazing part of the film is that nothing in it is CG or rendered on a computer. All of it is comprised of photos taken by Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. Here’s the first trailer:

    Is that not the most stunning thing you’ve ever seen? It’s mind blowing to think that all of that is floating out there around us. It really makes you appreciate how small we really are in the universe.

    In Saturn’s Rings is scheduled for release in Spring 2014. It will only be available in IMAX theaters for obvious reasons.

  • eBay Ups Its Search Game With Cassini

    eBay Ups Its Search Game With Cassini

    eBay has a new search engine powering the results on its site, and from the sound of it, it’s a huge step up from the search experience of years past.

    It’s called Cassini, and we first heard about it a little over a year ago, when news came out that both eBay and shopping rival Walmart having new search engines in the works. At the time, it was reported that eBay had poached several engineers from Microsoft’s Bing search unit to oversee Cassini.

    At the end of this past May, eBay announced Cassini’s roll-out at the company’s Analyst Day. eBay news blog TameBay covered the announcement, reporting:

    The new Cassini Search engine will index not only title but also everything else in the listing including the full description. Cassini will go further than pure keyword matching however. It will learn what’s important to a particular buyer and offer different selection depending on your preferences. For instance a new buyer that’s never purchased before on eBay might want to dial up trust and buy from in-country sellers with great feedback. A collector might want to dial up diversity and find the rare products to complete their collection. Other buyers may make buying decisions based on value and relevance and know exactly what they want to purchase but want the best price.

    This week, eBay’s own company blog points to an in-depth Wired piece about Cassini. A site like eBay, as the article points out, has the challenge of keeping search results in tune with the constantly changing inventory, and the company think it’s getting it right, or at least a whole lot better than it used to. Here’s a snippet from Wired:

    Of eBay’s 400 million listings, about 20 percent of that inventory leaves the system every day and is replaced by a similar volume of new listings. Prices change. Listings are revised. New signals are emerging constantly.

    …

    Engineers at eBay work to funnel that churn to thousands of servers in as close to real time as possible, Williams says. The goal is to index changes within 90 seconds—a demanding enough problem when trying to tame the data parsed by eBay’s old search engine, Voyager. To give Cassini the capacity to accomplish the same task while indexing vastly more data, eBay has built a data center from scratch in Utah (the shovel from the groundbreaking is in Williams’ office).

    WIth the roll-out of Cassini, users shouldn’t notice a difference in the site’s experience, other than hopefully getting better search results to better help them find what they’re looking for.

  • Cassini to Take Another Photo of Earth From Saturn

    Cassini to Take Another Photo of Earth From Saturn

    One of the most famous images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is of Saturn as it eclipses the Sun. With the gas giant bathed in shadow, a tiny speck called Earth can be seen in the photo.

    This week, NASA announced that Cassini will be recreating that famous photo. On July 19, the probe will take the picture as part of a mosaic being composed using Cassini pictures. Though the Earth will appear as only a pale blue dot roughly the size of one pixel, NASA is encouraging people in North America and parts of the Atlantic Ocean (which will be in sunlight at the time) to wave to the sky at around 2:30 pm to acknowledge the occasion.

    “While Earth will be only about a pixel in size from Cassini’s vantage point 898 million [1.44 billion kilometers] away, the team is looking forward to giving the world a chance to see what their home looks like from Saturn,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “We hope you’ll join us in waving at Saturn from Earth, so we can commemorate this special opportunity.

    In addition to providing a new photo of the Earth from Saturn, Cassini will be studying the planet’s ring during the 15 minutes it will spend in its shadow. The probe will be taking both visible- and infrared-light images of Saturn’s rings to gather data for researchers.

    “Looking back towards the sun through the rings highlights the tiniest of ring particles, whose width is comparable to the thickness of hair and which are difficult to see from ground-based telescopes,” said Matt Hedman, a Cassini science team member at Cornell University. “We’re particularly interested in seeing the structures within Saturn’s dusty E ring, which is sculpted by the activity of the geysers on the moon Enceladus, Saturn’s magnetic field and even solar radiation pressure.”

  • Monster Saturn Hurricane Imaged by Cassini

    Monster Saturn Hurricane Imaged by Cassini

    NASA has revealed new pictures and of a massive hurricane on Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft.

    The images depict a hurricane in Saturn’s north pole region. The eye of the storm is around 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) in diameter. The clouds on the hurricane’s outer edge are travelling at 150 meters per second (330 miles per hour).

    “We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

    NASA has stated that the storm on Saturn is “locked onto” the planet’s north pole. Cassini was unable to image Saturn’s northern hemisphere using visible light until 2009, when the planet’s equinox passed. Researchers hope that studying the hurricane on Saturn can provide data on how hurricanes on Earth develop and sustain themselves.

    “Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn’s equatorial plane,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “You cannot see the polar regions very well from an equatorial orbit. Observing the planet from different vantage points reveals more about the cloud layers that cover the entirety of the planet.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)

  • Meteors Spotted Hitting Saturn’s Rings

    Meteors Spotted Hitting Saturn’s Rings

    Watching stellar impacts as they occur is a rare treat for astronomers. The famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter (which left water in the planet’s atmosphere), which happened only 20 years ago, was the first directly-seen extraterrestrial collision in the solar system.

    This week, NASA revealed that Saturn has now been added to the short list of places in the Solar System where astronomers have been able to observe collisions occurring as they happen (Earth, the moon, and Jupiter are the others).

    NASA’s Cassini probe has captured images of meteoroids hitting the debris that makes up Saturn’s rings. Researchers believe that studying the impact rate on Saturn can help them determine more precisely how the planets in the Solar System formed.

    “These new results imply the current-day impact rates for small particles at Saturn are about the same as those at Earth – two very different neighborhoods in our solar system – and this is exciting to see,” said Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “It took Saturn’s rings acting like a giant meteoroid detector – 100 times the surface area of the Earth – and Cassini’s long-term tour of the Saturn system to address this question.”

    Cassini scientists studied data for years to find evidence of the tracks the small meteorites left behind. The research has been published in the latest issue of the journal Science.

    “We knew these little impacts were constantly occurring, but we didn’t know how big or how frequent they might be, and we didn’t necessarily expect them to take the form of spectacular shearing clouds,” said Matt Tiscareno, lead author of the paper and a Cassini participating scientist at Cornell University. “The sunlight shining edge-on to the rings at the Saturnian equinox acted like an anti-cloaking device, so these usually invisible features became plain to see.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Cornell)

  • NASA’s Cassini Probe Finds Accelerated Particles Around Saturn

    NASA’s Cassini Probe Finds Accelerated Particles Around Saturn

    NASA this week revealed that a “chance encounter” with solar wind around Saturn has allowed the Cassini probe to detect particles being accelerated to high energy states. The phenomenon is similar to the acceleration of high-energy cosmic rays found coming from supernova remnants just last week.

    The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, show how certain kinds of solar winds can accelerate electrons. NASA in a statement today said that solar wind around Saturn’s magnetic field forms a shockwave that Cassini can use to study the particle acceleration effect.

    “Cassini has essentially given us the capability of studying the nature of a supernova shock in situ in our own solar system, bridging the gap to distant high-energy astrophysical phenomena that are usually only studied remotely,” said Adam Masters, lead researcher on the paper and a researcher at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.

    The detection of electron acceleration around Saturn came just as a strong shockwave was detected by Cassini. The researchers are looking for “quasi-parallel” shockwaves, which occur when a magnetic field and the direction of the shock are closely aligned.

    Shockwaves, such as those from a supernova or solar wind, are common in the universe. When they hit magnetic fields with certain orientations, particles from the shockwave can be accelerated to close the speed of light. These interactions, scientists believe, could be the source of much of the cosmic rays seen in the universe.

    (Image courtesy ESA)

  • Cassini Spots Smog Formation on Titan

    Cassini Spots Smog Formation on Titan

    A new paper using data from NASA‘s Cassini probe has described in detail how aerosols begin to form in the highest part of the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. The research, say scientists, could help predict how “smoggy aerosol layers” behave on Earth.

    The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, states that the smog on Titan begins to form when solar radiation excites nitrogen and methane molecules in the ionosphere, creating a “soup” of negative and positive ions. Collisions among these molecules allows them to grow into more complex aerosols, which coagulate when they reach a lower part of the atmosphere. Eventually the molecules produce the hydrocarbon rain that famously creates the lakes seen on Titan’s surface.

    The researchers, based at the University of Reims, looked at data from three different Cassini instruments during the study. Data from Cassini’s plasma spectrometer, its ion and neutral mass spectrometer, and its radio and plasma wave science experiment were examined and compared to data from the Huygens probe, which descended to the surface of Titan in 2005.

    Titan is the only other object in the soar system known to have stable liquid on its surface. In December of 2012 the ESA released a high-definition photo of a river valley that runs for over 400 km (248 miles) on the surface of Titan. The picture above shows a flash of sunlight that is reflected off a lake on Titan. The phenomenon is known as a specular reflection.

  • Cassini Spotted Storm Eating Itself on Saturn

    Cassini Spotted Storm Eating Itself on Saturn

    NASA‘s Cassini probe has spotted a storm on Saturn that has “consumed” itself. The massive storm whirled around the planet until it ran into its own tail end and dispersed. A new paper on the event, published in the journal Icarus, describes it as the first time researchers have ever seen such a thing happen in the solar system.

    “This Saturn storm behaved like a terrestrial hurricane – but with a twist unique to Saturn,” said Andrew Ingersoll, co-author of the paper and a Cassini imaging team member. “Even the giant storms at Jupiter don’t consume themselves like this, which goes to show that nature can play many awe-inspiring variations on a theme and surprise us again and again.”

    The storm was first detected in December of 2010, forming from warm gas in the planet’s atmosphere. It began moving west along 33 degrees north latitude, spinning clockwise. The storm eventually stretched 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) around the planet. With no mountains or other land to impede it, the storm eventually ran into itself in June 2011 and faded away.

    “This thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn was a beast,” said Kunio Sayanagi, lead author on the paper and a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University. “The storm maintained its intensity for an unusually long time. The storm head itself thrashed for 201 days, and its updraft erupted with an intensity that would have sucked out the entire volume of Earth’s atmosphere in 150 days. And it also created the largest vortex ever observed in the troposphere of Saturn, expanding up to 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) across.”

    Though the storm was the longest-running of the massive storms that occur in Saturn’s northern hemisphere every 30 (Earth) years, it isn’t the longest storm ever detected on the gas giant. That honor goes to a storm 100 times smaller, which formed in the southern hemisphere’s “storm alley” and lasted 334 days in 2009.

    “Cassini’s stay in the Saturn system has enabled us to marvel at the power of this storm,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “We had front-row seats to a wonderful adventure movie and got to watch the whole plot from start to finish. These kinds of data help scientists compare weather patterns around our solar system and learn what sustains and extinguishes them.”

  • Titan’s Craters Could be Filled With Hydrocarbon Sand, Says NASA

    Titan’s Craters Could be Filled With Hydrocarbon Sand, Says NASA

    New findings from NASA‘s Cassini probe have revealed that Saturn’s moon Titan may look younger than it really is. Dunes of hydrocarbon sand have been slowly filling up the craters that pockmark the moon.

    “Most of the Saturnian satellites – Titan’s siblings – have thousands and thousands of craters on their surface,” said Catherine Neish, a Cassini radar team associate based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “So far on Titan, of the 50 percent of the surface that we’ve seen in high resolution, we’ve only found about 60 craters. It’s possible that there are many more craters on Titan, but they are not visible from space because they are so eroded. We typically estimate the age of a planet’s surface by counting the number of craters on it (more craters means an older surface). But if processes like stream erosion or drifting sand dunes are filling them in, it’s possible that the surface is much older that it appears.”

    The new research is the first quantitative estimate of how much the weather on Titan has eroded its surface. The moon is the only one known in our solar system to have a thick atmosphere. It is also known to have seas of organic compounds, such as ethane and methane, on its surface.

    Methane is broken down in Titan’s atmosphere by sunlight, then recombined into more complex hydrocarbons. These molecules form an orange smog that envelops the planet. Some of the larger particles from the atmosphere, say scientists, rain down and become bound together into an exotic form of sand.

    “Since the sand appears to be produced from the atmospheric methane, Titan must have had methane in its atmosphere for at least several hundred million years in order to fill craters to the levels we are seeing,” said Neish.

    Titan’s methane levels are somewhat of a mystery, however. Researchers estimate that current levels of methane on Titan would be broken down within tens of millions of years. This suggests that the moon either had much more methane in the past, or is replenishing its methane in some way.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/GSFC)

  • Ice May Float on Titan’s Seas, Finds New Study

    Ice May Float on Titan’s Seas, Finds New Study

    Scientists have published a new study that concludes Saturn’s moon Titan might have ice floating in its seas. The presence of hydrocarbon ice in Titan’s methane lakes and seas could explain the mixed readings NASA‘s Cassini probe has seen while recording the reflectivity of the moon’s surface.

    “One of the most intriguing questions about these lakes and seas is whether they might host an exotic form of life,” said Jonathan Lunine, co-author of the research and a Cassini interdisciplinary Titan scientist at Cornell University. “And the formation of floating hydrocarbon ice will provide an opportunity for interesting chemistry along the boundary between liquid and solid, a boundary that may have been important in the origin of terrestrial life.”

    Floating methane ice was thought to be impossible on Titan, since solid methane is more dense than liquid methane, and would sink. The new research considers the interplay between Titan’s lakes and the moon’s atmosphere. Scientists found that the types of methane and ethane ice that might exist on Titan will float if the temperature is below 90.4 kelvins (297 degrees Fahrenheit), methane’s freezing point.

    “We now know it’s possible to get methane-and-ethane-rich ice freezing over on Titan in thin blocks that congeal together as it gets colder — similar to what we see with Arctic sea ice at the onset of winter,” said Jason Hofgartner, lead author of the paper and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada scholar at Cornell. “We’ll want to take these conditions into consideration if we ever decide to explore the Titan surface some day.”

    Titan is the only other object in our solar system besides Earth known to have bodies of liquid on its surface. Its seas are composed of organic molecules that are believed to have been the building blocks for life on Earth.

  • NASA Releases New Cassini, Spitzer Photos For the Holidays

    Just in time for the holidays, NASA has released two new space photos filled with festive greens and reds.

    The photo seen above (a larger version of which can be seen here) was taken using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. the infrared image depicts the giant star Zeta Ophiuchi as it hurtles through space, causing a wave in the dust in its path.

    Astronomers believe Zeta Ophiuchi, which is 20 times more massive than our sun, was once a companion star to an even larger star. When the larger star’s life ended, Zeta Ophiuchi was explosively ejected from its system.

    Saturn backlit

    The above image of Saturn was taken by NASA’s Cassini probe. A larger version can be seen by clicking the photo. It shows a backlit view of the planet Saturn and its rings taken during Cassini’s 174th orbit of the giant planet. The two small objects in the bottom-left of the photo are Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Tethys.

    Cassini, which has been studying Saturn and its numerous moons since 2004, was intentionally positioned within Saturn’s shadow for the pic. It’s a perspective Cassini hasn’t had since 2006 when it took the “In Saturn’s Shadow” photo – one of the most popular Cassini images to date, according to NASA.

    “Of all the many glorious images we have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those taken from Saturn’s shadow,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini’s imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute.

    The Cassini spacecraft recently celebrated its 15th birthday since its launch back in 1997. In its time in orbit, the probe has launched the Huygens probe to the surface of Titan, where hydrocarbon lakes have also been discovered.

    (Images courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

  • Cassini to Track Venus Transit, Study Exoplanets

    NASA announced today that it will begin using the Cassini probe’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) for uses other than studying Saturn and its moons.

    On Friday, from its vantage point in orbit around Saturn, the VIMS will be used to track Venus as it travels across the face of the sun. A similar Venus transit could be seen from Earth earlier this summer, but Friday’s transit will be the first time a spacecraft has tracked the transit of a planet in our solar system from beyond Earth.

    The VIMS will collect data on Venus’ atmosphere during the event. The observations are also a chance for astronomers to test the VIMS’s ability to observe planets outside the solar system, in an effort to reduce the amount of signal noise. The instrument has already been used to observe a transit by an exoplanet called HD 189733b.

    “Interest in infrared investigations of extrasolar planets has exploded in the years since Cassini launched, so we had no idea at the time that we’d ask VIMS to learn this new kind of trick,” said Phil Nicholson, the VIMS team member based at Cornell University. “But VIMS has worked so well at Saturn so far that we can start thinking about other things it can do.”

    Since Cassini’s launch in 1997, astronomers have used NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to identify numerous exoplanets. Scientists are hoping to use Cassini’s VIMS to investigate the atmospheres of those planets, in particular whether they contain methane or other hydrocarbons.

    The VIMS has also been used in another novel way recently. Back in April 2012, astronomers used the instrument to take thermal data from warm fissures located on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

    “For the first time, we were able to see that the jets coming from the surface of Enceladus originated in very small, very hot spots,” said Bonnie Buratti, a VIMS scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This new observation is good evidence for liquid water underneath the surface.”

    (Images courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

  • Cassini Spots “Mini Nile River” on Saturn’s Titan

    The Cassini probe orbiting Saturn and its moons has photographed what the European Space Agency (ESA) is calling a “miniature extraterrestrial version of the Nile river” on Saturn’s moon Titan. The formation is a river valley on the the moon’s surface that runs for over 400 km (248 miles) from its source to a large sea. The radar image is the first time such a long river system has been photographed in high resolution anywhere except Earth.

    “Though there are some short, local meanders, the relative straightness of the river valley suggests it follows the trace of at least one fault, similar to other large rivers running into the southern margin of this same Titan sea,” said Jani Radebaugh, a Cassini radar team associate at Brigham Young University. “Such faults – fractures in Titan’s bedrock – may not imply plate tectonics, like on Earth, but still lead to the opening of basins and perhaps to the formation of the giant seas themselves.”

    Researchers explained that they believe the river is filled with liquid because it is dark along its entire extent in the image. This indicates a smooth surface, and Titan is the only other object in the solar system known to have stable liquid on its surface. The liquid likely isn’t water, though. Titan’s environment contains liquid hydrocarbons, such as ethane and methane.

    “This radar-imaged river by Cassini provides another fantastic snapshot of a world in motion, which was first hinted at from the images of channels and gullies seen by ESA’s Huygens probe as it descended to the moon’s surface in 2005,” said Nicolas Altobelli, ESA’s Cassini Project Scientist.

    The Cassini probe recently celebrated its 15th birthday since launch. In its time around Saturn, the probe has found lakes on Titan, signs of water ice on Enceladus, and followed huge storms in Saturn’s atmosphere.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL–Caltech/ASI)

  • Huge Saturn Storm Photographed by Cassini

    Huge Saturn Storm Photographed by Cassini

    NASA today released photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn and its moons. The images reveal a “swirling vortex” that covers part of Saturn’s north polar hexagon. NASA stated that Cassini has been traversing Saturn’s system in tilted orbits, which gave mission scientists these amazing views of the planet’s polar region.

    Saturn's north pole

    The images were taken on Tuesday, when Cassini was just 250,000 miles from Saturn. The large storm is similar to one Cassini has photographed at the planet’s south pole in the past. Back in 2008, Cassini detected storms at Saturn’s north pole, but only at infrared wavelengths. Now that the seasons on the ringed planet have changed, the northern polar region is no longer in darkness and the massive storm can be photographed in visible light.

    Saturn's south pole storm

    Cassini observed a similar seasonal shift on Titan recently. As the southern winter on Titan has begun, sinking air at the south pole has prompted an abrupt shift in the circulation of the moon’s atmosphere and a vortex has formed over the south pole.

    Cassini has been observing Saturn and its most interesting moons since 2004, and recently celebrated the 15th anniversary since its launch. The probe is currently on its third and final mission. In September 2017, it is scheduled to enter Saturn’s atmosphere, where it will be “crushed and vaporized” by the planet’s atmosphere.

    (Images courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)