Latest Titan Saturn System Mission Stories
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,...
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...
Peter Suciu for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. While the Book of Ecclesiastes and American folk singer Pete Seeger may not have considered Titan, the planet Saturn’s largest moon, as something unto which there is a season, it does seem that the moon has seen a type of turn or change in the seasons. On Wednesday, scientists using the international Cassini spacecraft have studied the rapid change in...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online We have sent a man to the moon, rovers to Mars and two Voyager missions into the great unknown reaches of space. Perhaps, it's time to land a boat on Titan. Although this idea is just in the concept stage, scientists say it is time to really consider it, and a group of engineers presented their proposals at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) on September 27, 2012. The European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) is an...
WASHINGTON, June 28, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn's moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) Researchers saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They deduced that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or solid "tides," on the...
NASA's Cassini spacecraft will be flying within about 46 miles (74 kilometers) of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Wednesday, May 2, aiming primarily to learn more about the moon's internal structure. The flyby is the third part of a trilogy of flybys -- the other two took place on April 28, 2010, and Nov. 30, 2010 -- for Cassini's radio science experiment. The radio science team is particularly interested in learning how mass is distributed under Enceladus' south polar region, which features jets...
A new study based on data from the Cassini spacecraft suggests that a lake on one of Saturn's moons behaves similarly to the Etosha salt pan on Earth. A group led by Thomas Cornet of the Université de Nantes, France, a Cassini associate, found characteristics of Ontario Lake on Titan are similar to Etosha Pan in Namibia, Africa because it drains and refills from below. Etosha Pan is a lake bed that fills with a shallow layer of water from groundwater levels that rise during the rainy...
A new analysis of radar data from NASA's Cassini mission, in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, has revealed regional variations among sand dunes on Saturn's moon Titan. The result gives new clues about the moon's climatic and geological history. Dune fields are the second most dominant landform on Titan, after the seemingly uniform plains, so they offer a large-scale insight into the moon's peculiar environment. The dunes cover about 13 percent of the...
Titan's northern hemisphere is set for mainly fine spring weather, with polar skies clearing since the equinox in August last year. Cassini's VIMS instrument has been monitoring clouds on Titan continuously since the spacecraft went into orbit around Saturn. Now, a team led by Sébastien Rodriguez (AIM laboratory - Université Paris Diderot) has used more than 2000 VIMS images to create the first long-term study of Titan's weather that includes the equinox, using observational...
As American schoolchildren head out to pools for a summer splash, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will be taking its own deep plunge through the Titan atmosphere this week.The altitude for the upcoming Titan flyby, whose closest approach occurs in the evening of July 6, Pacific and Eastern time (or shortly after midnight on July 7, Coordinated Universal Time) will be about 125 kilometers (78 miles) higher than the super-low flyby of June 21. The altitude of this flyby - 1,005 kilometers (624 miles)...
