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Saturn

STUDY: Saturn’s Core Mighty Be Soupy (But Is It More Minestrone or Clam Chowder?)

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pea soup - pixabay

Saturn’s rings aren’t just a beautiful adornment — scientists can use the feature to understand what’s happening deep inside the planet. By using the famous rings like a seismograph, scientists studied processes in the planet’s interior and determined that its core must be “fuzzy.” Instead of a solid sphere like Earth’s, the core of Saturn appears to consist of a ‘soup’ of rocks, ice and metallic fluids that slosh around and affect the planet’s gravity. The new study used data from NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn and its moons for 13 years between 2004 and 2017. In 2013, data … Read more

SOLAR SYSTEM: Oh the Weather Outside is Frightful…

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Mars dust storm - NASA/JPL

Our solar system is home to some weird and wonderful weather, with storms more terrifying in scale than anything in Earth’s recorded history. From centuries-old hurricanes on Jupiter to immense winds on Neptune, if you leave Earth you’ll be shocked by what you find. On Mars you will find immense dust storms that cover the entire planet, while Venus has an incredibly thick and fast-moving atmosphere that can form permanent vortices at its poles. On Jupiter and Saturn there are some huge storms — bigger than the diameter of multiple Earths — that have raged for decades or even centuries. … Read more

SPACE: Titan’s Largest sea is Really Deep, Too

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Titan - NASA

NASA’s epic Cassini mission at Saturn is still generating valuable scientific data more than three years after its demise. Data from one of the spacecraft’s last flybys of Titan, a large moon with the precursors of life’s chemistry, reveals that a huge lake on the surface called Kraken Mare is more than 1,000 feet ( 300 meters) deep — that’s roughly the equivalent of the height of New York City’s Chrysler Building. In fact, the lake is so deep that Cassini’s radar couldn’t probe all the way to the bottom. Back in 2014, preliminary data from this flyby suggested that … Read more