Latest Huygens Stories

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft, now exploring Saturn, will take a picture of our home planet from a distance of hundreds of millions of miles on July 19. NASA is inviting the public to help acknowledge the historic interplanetary portrait as it is being taken. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Earth will appear as a small, pale blue dot between the rings of Saturn in the image, which will be part of a mosaic,...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists writing in The Astrophysical Journal say they have found aerosol "snow" on Saturn's moon Titan. The scientists said they confirmed the presence of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the upper atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon. This study provides an explanation of the origin of the aerosol particles found in the lowest haze layer that blankets Titan's surface. Titan has an atmosphere most resembling that of...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The first global topographical map of Saturn’s moon Titan was created by scientists at the Cassini-Huygens mission. The map, published as part of a paper in the journal Icarus, will give researchers a valuable tool for learning more about one of the most Earth-like and interesting worlds in the solar system. With a radius of approximately 1,600 miles, Titan is Saturn’s largest moon. As the second-largest moon in the Solar System,...

WASHINGTON, April 29, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn's north pole. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane's eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of...

WASHINGTON, April 25, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) These observations make Saturn's rings the only location besides Earth, the moon, and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur. Studying the impact rate of...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Part of the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan has been actively tracked by NASA’s Cassini mission for the past several years. During that time, the mission has found a remarkable presence of hydrocarbon methane lakes and seas dotting the surface of the moon. But a model developed by mission leaders at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, suggests the supply of these methane lakes will soon come to end. Of...

Watch the video “Jupiter’s Hot Spots” Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Planetary scientists at NASA have found that a weather phenomenon also found in Earth’s atmosphere is responsible for the activity of so-called ‘hot spots’ slightly bigger than North America drifting across Jupiter’s atmosphere. Using images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft as it passed Jupiter en route to Saturn, scientists have determined that hot pockets of gas in...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum announced that the team responsible for the successful landing of NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover will receive its 2013 Trophy for Current Achievement on April 24 in Washington DC. “The Current Achievement winner can be summarized in two words: sky crane,” said a museum press release describing the award. “This phrase embodied the audacious plan that the Entry, Descent, and Landing team...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The international Cassini spacecraft, a NASA, European Space Agency (ESA) and Italian Space Agency (ASI) jointly-operated project, has taken some unique pictures of Earth's twin planet from the perspective of Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens mission launched on October 15, 1997, traveling 2.2 billion miles toward Saturn, reaching the distant ringed-planet June 30, 2004. The orbiter includes 18 sophisticated science instruments to help...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international group of scientists, led by Panayotis Lavvas of the University of Reims, Champagne-Ardenne, used data from NASA's Cassini mission to describe, in unparalleled detail, how aerosols in the highest part of the atmosphere are kick-started on Saturn's moon Titan. The study, published in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), seeks to understand aerosol formation at Titan because it could...