Cassini's Final Year Will Not Be Idle

Did you know that NASA's Cassini has been working diligently in the Saturn system for 13 years!

Cassini will also end it's mission Sept. 2017 when it will dive straight into Saturn. 

This last year will hardly be idle.  Cassini still needs to complete projects like a flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon of which it has made over 125 close passes.

For more information, please press HERE

Summer Storms are Blowin on Titan

Computer models have long predicted the onset of storms in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has finally been able to capture these storm clouds over Titan's  northern sea  Ligeia Mare.  The storm being tracked was producing very Earthlike winds of  7 to 10 mph.

Storm clouds have been documented on Titan's southern latitudes since Cassini arrived in 2004, during Titan's summer in the lower latitudes.  But until 2010 when Titan entered summer in the northern latitude, no clouds had been seen until now.

The picture here was obtained in July 2014 as Cassini receded from Titan after a close flyby.

I would hazard a guess that most of us suffer from hubris when thinking of a Titan year being analogous to a Luna year here on Earth. (for those of you scratching your head and saying umm luna year is the same as Earths because it travels around the Sun with us...well no...a "year" is one orbit around the primary by a secondary or satellite.  Luna year apx. 29 days) Titans year however is 30 Earth years and a season is about 7 EYs.   Wow do you start to get the scale of things out in the gas giant arena?   Luna orbits Earth so fast because it is so freakishly close!

You can read the rest of the Astronomy Magazine article HERE



http://www.astronomy.com/news/2014/08/cassini-tracks-clouds-developing-over-a-titan-sea

Cassini find something strange on Titan?

Tim Sayell just wrote in with an article that I have been seeing a lot of lately. From Yahoo News

comes a report that NASA's probe Cassini has found something strange on Saturn's moon Titan. The new data rekindles speculation that Titan may harbor some sort of life all its own.

Chemical analysis of data returned by Cassini suggested that hydrogen was flowing down through Titan's atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. First thing is that this really shouldn't be taking place, second, what IS then causing the discrepancy. Some scientists speculate that there may be a strange life form responsible.

From the article:

• Another study investigating hydrocarbons on Titan's surface found a lack of acetylene, a compound that could be consumed as food by life that relies on liquid methane instead of liquid water to live.

Of course there are many explanations on what these could be. Read the Yahoo News article and you decide.

Cassini discovers strange hills on Titan

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found hills with odd radial patterns on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. As you can see in this picture, the hill top, center has straight line grooves as does the hill in the lower left quadrant. Stranger still is the hill, lower right which has an even stranger star shaped pattern. The grooved mounds, located in a northern hemisphere, are about 50 miles wide and about 200 feet high, and the patterns had not previously been seen on Titan before. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory theorize that the patterns might be caused by tectonic forces, such as the forces that pull the crust of a planet apart, or rainfall that leads to erosion.

upi.com

Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth

Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. At a balmy minus 179º C , Titan is a far cry from Earth. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon's surface, and tholins probably make up its dunes. The term ‘tholins’ was coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry.

Astronomers Puzzled by Titan's Missing Craters

The Cassini spacecraft’s radar sweep of Saturn’s largest moon Titan in January revealed a portion of what appears to be a 110 mile (180 kilometer) diameter This would only be the fourth such crater discovered on Titan, a surprisingly small number. Impact cratering is pervasive in our solar system. Earth's Moon remains heavily pockmarked because it has no significant weather or geological processes to wipe its face clean. Earth, similarly bombarded over the eons, shows many scars from relatively recent impacts that have not had time to weather away. Craters are common on several other satellites of Saturn. If Titan's surface had the same density of craters that other Saturnian moons have, there should be thousands of craters. With only three and a half dozen possibles, the question is "where did all the craters go?" Titan’s thick nitrogen atmosphere is partly responsible. It hinders the formation of impact craters less than about 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter, because smaller space rocks burn up before they reach the surface. Clues to Titan’s smooth finish can be seen in the presence of vast tracts of sand dunes, river channels and evidence for cryovolcanism visible in Cassini images. It is likely that a combination of burial in sand, erosion by methane or obliteration by the cold hand of cryovolcanism is responsible for paving over the craters.

Submitted by Shaun A. Saunders