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TOPIC: Titan
Blobrana


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RE: Titan
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Surprise Hidden in Titan's Smog: Cirrus-Like Clouds

Every day is a bad-air day on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Blanketed by haze far worse than any smog belched out in Los Angeles, Beijing or even Sherlock Holmes's London, the moon looks like a dirty orange ball. Described once as crude oil without the sulphur, the haze is made of tiny droplets of hydrocarbons with other, more noxious chemicals mixed in. Gunk.
Icky as it may sound, Titan is really the rarest of gems: the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere worthy of a planet. This atmosphere comes complete with lightning, drizzle and occasionally a big, summer-downpour style of cloud made of methane or ethane -- hydrocarbons that are best known for their role in natural gas.
Now, thin, wispy clouds of ice particles, similar to Earth's cirrus clouds, are being reported by Carrie Anderson and Robert Samuelson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md. The findings, published February 1 in Icarus, were made using the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) on NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
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Blobrana


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Sotra volcano
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Giant ice volcano may have been found on Titan

A potential new ice volcano has been found on Saturn's moon Titan.
Named Sotra, the volcano is nearly 1 kilometre tall and has a 1.6-kilometre-deep pit alongside it. Surrounded by giant sand dunes, it is thought to be the largest in a string of several volcanoes that once spewed molten ice from deep beneath the moon's surface.
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Blobrana


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Possible ice volcano spied on giant Saturn moon

Scientists say they have found the best evidence yet of an ice volcano on Saturn's giant moon Titan.
During a flyby, the international Cassini spacecraft spied two peaks over 3,000 feet tall and what looked like volcanic flows on Titan.
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Blobrana


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NASA's Cassini spacecraft has sent back dreamy raw images of Saturn's moon Titan that show the appearance of clouds around the moon's midsection. These bright clouds likely appeared because the moon is changing seasons and spring has arrived in Titan's northern hemisphere. The images were taken from about 2.5 million kilometres away from Titan on Oct. 18, 2010, and also show the faint etchings of Saturn's rings. One of the new raw images also features a cameo from the icy moon Tethys, which looks smaller and brighter than Titan in the image.
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Blobrana


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The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved the name Paxsi for a ringed feature on the moon Titan.

Paxsi is a 120-km wide ringed feature located at 5.0N, 341.2W.
The feature is named after Aymara, a Peruvean/Bolivia goddess of the moon.

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Blobrana


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Spring on Titan brings sunshine and patchy clouds

The northern hemisphere of Saturn's moon Titan is set for mainly fine spring weather, with polar skies clearing since the equinox in August last year. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been monitoring clouds on Titan regularly since the spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004. Now, a group led by Sébastien Rodriguez, a Cassini VIMS team collaborator based at Université Paris Diderot, France, has analysed more than 2,000 VIMS images to create the first long-term study of Titan's weather using observational data that also includes the equinox. Equinox, when the sun shone directly over the equator, occurred in August 2009.
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Blobrana


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Raisin' Mountains on Saturn's Moon Titan

Saturn's moon Titan ripples with mountains, and scientists have been trying to figure out how they form. The best explanation, it turns out, is that Titan is shrinking as it cools, wrinkling up the moon's surface like a raisin.
A new model developed by scientists working with radar data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows that differing densities in the outermost layers of Titan can account for the unusual surface behaviour. Titan is slowly cooling because it is releasing heat from its original formation and radioactive isotopes are decaying in the interior. As this happens, parts of Titan's subsurface ocean freeze over, the outermost ice crust thickens and folds, and the moon shrivels up. The model is described in an article now online in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
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Blobrana


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Blowing in the Wind: Cassini Helps with Dune Whodunit

The answer to the mystery of dune patterns on Saturn's moon Titan did turn out to be blowing in the wind. It just wasn't from the direction many scientists expected.
Basic principles describing the rotation of planetary atmospheres and data from the European Space Agency's Huygens probe led to circulation models that showed surface winds streaming generally east-to-west around Titan's equatorial belt. But when NASA's Cassini spacecraft obtained the first images of dunes on Titan in 2005, the dunes' orientation suggested the sands - and therefore the winds - were moving from the opposite direction, or west to east.
A new paper by Tetsuya Tokano in press with the journal Aeolian Research seeks to explain the paradox. It explains that seasonal changes appear to reverse wind patterns on Titan for a short period. These gusts, which occur intermittently for perhaps two years, sweep west to east and are so strong they do a better job of transporting sand than the usual east-to-west surface winds. Those east-to-west winds do not appear to gather enough strength to move significant amounts of sand.
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Blobrana


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Ontario Lacus
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See Beautiful Ontario Lacus

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Blobrana


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Titan Lake
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Caltech Scientists Measure Changing Lake Depths on Titan

On Earth, lake levels rise and fall with the seasons and with longer-term climate changes, as precipitation, evaporation, and runoff add and remove liquid. Now, for the first time, scientists have found compelling evidence for similar lake-level changes on Saturn's largest moon, Titan - the only other place in the solar system seen to have a hydrological cycle with standing liquid on the surface.
Using data gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft over a span of four years, the researchers - led by graduate student Alexander G. Hayes of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Oded Aharonson, associate professor of planetary science at Caltech - have obtained two separate lines of evidence showing roughly a 1 meter per year drop in the levels of lakes in Titan's southern hemisphere. The decrease is the result of the seasonal evaporation of liquid methane from the lakes - which, because of Titan's frigid temperatures (roughly minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit at the poles), are composed largely of liquid methane, ethane, and propane.
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