Cassini takes a close look at Titan (again)

[Rick]

Cassini and Titan: Radar discovers Space Arabia

The European Space Agency's and NASA's Saturn mission has beamed back images of shifting dunes on the surface of the giant moon Titan (see right). Cassini's radar imager found the Earth-like desert landscapes dominating huge swathes of the moon's surface near the equator.

The dunes are up to 150m high and can span hundreds of kilometres, according to researchers reporting in Science.

More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/05/titan_dunes/

[Rick]

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has snapped a mile-high mountain range on Saturn's moon Titan, the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced yesterday.

Titan's sierra - possibly capped with methane "snow" - runs just to the south of the moon's equator for around 150km (93 miles). It's about 30km (19 miles) wide and reaches 1.5km into Titan's atmosphere.

More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/13/titanic_sierra/

The horse's mouth: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=709

[Whitters]

A giant cloud half the size of the United States has been imaged on Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft. The cloud may be responsible for the material that fills the lakes discovered last year by Cassini's radar instrument.

More at:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMP7VSMTWE_0.html

[Rick]

Nasa's Cassini probe has found evidence for seas, probably filled with liquid hydrocarbons, at the high northern latitudes of Saturn's moon Titan.

The dark features, detected by Cassini's radar, are much bigger than any lakes already detected on Titan.

The largest is some 100,000 sq km (39,000 sq miles) - greater in extent than North America's Lake Superior.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6449081.stm

[Rick]

Scientists were dismayed when, as they watched the Huygens probe fall to the surface on Saturn's moon Titan, one of its key experiments failed.

At the time, it looked like vital science would be lost, but now, after two years of painstaking reconstruction, the teams have been able to piece together an astonishingly detailed picture of the moon, its surface, and atmosphere.

More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/04/titan_data_still/

[Rick]

This week, Cassini's travels will bring it by Saturn's moon Tethys (June 27) and Titan (June 29). Cassini will get a close-up look at the large crater Odysseus, which is 450 kilometers (280 miles) in diameter, and Ithaca Chasma, a canyon that is four times as long as Earth's Grand Canyon. Scientists are studying how this canyon formed and whether Tethys was active in the past, like Enceladus is currently.

Scientists will also obtain close-up images of mysterious dark patches on the moon, and they will be taking data to understand what the surface is made of.

See: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/events/t33-tethys/index.cfm

[Rick]

Saturn's moon Titan may have a deep, hidden ocean, according to data published in the journal Science.

Radar images from the Cassini-Huygens mission reinforce predictions that a reservoir of liquid water exists beneath the thick crust of ice.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7307584.stm

[Rick]

If worlds have shadow twins elsewhere in the Universe, then Earth's would appear to lie just a block or two down the cosmic road, in orbit around Saturn.

"We have on Titan many of the geological features that we find on Earth," enthuses Rosaly Lopes.

"We find volcanism, we find tectonics, we find erosion and deposition, and wind activity forming dunes.

"It's very similar to the Earth."

But there is a crucial difference: Titan is so cold that most of the water is solid.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7350100.stm

[mickw]

When the Cassini spacecraft reached Saturn's largest moon Titan and deployed its Huygens probe to study the surface, it lifted a shroud that had hung over a world possibly containing conditions for life's building blocks.

Now a planetary scientist and an astronomy writer have laid out Cassini's findings and Titan's enduring mysteries in a new book, "Titan Unveiled" (Princeton University Press, 2008).

More:  http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080616-mm-titan-unveiled.html

[Rick]

Scientists are drafting a plan to further explore Saturnian moon Titan, involving an orbiting spacecraft, surface probe and hot-air balloon designed to float gracefully through the body's hazy hydrocarbon atmosphere, Space.com reports.

Titan has to date revealed some of its secrets to the Cassini spacecraft and Huygens probe, including liquid hydrocarbon lakes and some turbulent atmospheric conditions.

However, while Cassini's radar and infrared instruments have offered tantalising glimpses of Titan, much remains to be explored.

More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/12/titan_ballooning_trip/

[Rick]

An American scientist believes he may have come up with an explanation for the curious lakes of liquefied petroleum gas found at the polar regions of Titan, moon of Saturn. It could be because Titan is not spherical, but has a liquid layer which is.

More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/07/titan_lpg_lakes_theory/

[mickw]

There are hundreds of millions of miles of the void of space between climate scientists and Saturn's frigid moon Titan. But in spite of the distance, the scientists nearly got it right when they made a model of the moon's climate. The only thing off was the timing.

Scientists found that the way clouds are distributed around Titan mostly matches their models. Contrary to predictions, however, clouds still have not dissipated from the southern hemisphere as the moon's fall season approaches.

"Titan's clouds don't move with the seasons exactly as we expected," Sebastien Rodriguez of the University of Paris Diderot, who works with the Cassini mission, said in a statement.

More:   http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/090609-titan-clouds.html

[mickw]

A tropical storm was not what astronomers expected to see when they pointed their telescopes toward the equator of Saturn's moon Titan last summer.

But that's exactly what they found on this beguiling moon, home to a weather system both eerily familiar and perplexingly strange. The discovery was announced today.

In many ways Titan's climate resembles that of Earth, but instead of a water cycle, Titan has a methane cycle. Clouds, rain and lakes all exist on Titan, but they are all made of methane. In the moon's frigid climate, any water is frozen into rock-hard ice.

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090812-titan-clouds.html

[Rick]

(CNN) -- NASA scientists revealed Friday a first-of-its-kind image from space showing reflecting sunlight from a lake on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

It's the first visual "smoking gun" evidence of liquid on the northern hemisphere of the moon, scientists said, and the first-ever photo from another world showing a "specular reflection" -- which is reflection of light from an extremely smooth surface and in this case, a liquid one.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/12/18/saturn.titan.reflection/index.html

[Rick]

Cassini Halloween Treat: Titan Glows in the Dark

A literal shot in the dark by imaging cameras on NASA's Cassini spacecraft has yielded an image of a visible glow from Titan, emanating not just from the top of Titan's atmosphere, but also - surprisingly - from deep in the atmosphere through the moon's haze. A person in a balloon in Titan's haze layer wouldn't see the glow because it's too faint - something like a millionth of a watt. Scientists were able to detect it with Cassini because the spacecraft's cameras are able to take long-exposure images.

"It turns out that Titan glows in the dark - though very dimly," said Robert West, the lead author of a recent study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and a Cassini imaging team scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's a little like a neon sign, where electrons generated by electrical power bang into neon atoms and cause them to glow. Here we're looking at light emitted when charged particles bang into nitrogen molecules in Titan's atmosphere."

More: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-344