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

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

SPACE: Signs of Possible Life on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus?

Enceladus - Pixabay

The methane wafting from Enceladus may be a sign that life teems in the Saturn moon’s subsurface sea, a new study reports. In 2005, NASA’s Cassini Saturn orbiter discovered geysers blasting particles of water ice into space from “tiger stripe” fractures near Enceladus’ south pole. That material, which forms a plume that feeds Saturn’s E ring (the planet’s second-outermost ring), is thought to come from a huge ocean of liquid water that sloshes beneath the moon’s icy shell. And there’s more than just water ice in the plume. During numerous close flybys of the 313-mile-wide (504 kilometers) Enceladus, Cassini spotted … Read more

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

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

SPACE: Titan’s Possibility of Life Takes a Hit

Saturn’s most Earth-like moon looks a bit less likely to host life, thanks to quantum mechanics, the weird rules that govern subatomic particles. Titan, the second largest moon in our solar system after Jupiter’s Ganymede, is unique in two ways that have convinced some researchers that this moon might host extraterrestrial life: It’s the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it’s the only body in space, besides Earth, known to definitely have pools of liquid on its surface. In Titan’s case, those pools are frigid lakes of hydrocarbons, closer to the gasoline in a car … Read more

SPACE: Saturn Sprouts Another Weird Hexagon

saturn hexagon

A bizarre, hexagon-shaped vortex has formed above Saturn’s north pole as the planet’s northern hemisphere enters summer, data from the international Cassini-Huygens mission revealed. The unusual vortex is circulating hundreds of kilometers above the clouds in the stratosphere layer of the ringed planet’s atmosphere, a new study reported. This warm polar vortex resembles another, previously discovered hexagon formation, also located at Saturn’s north pole, but lower in the atmosphere. But how and whether these bizarre low- and high-altitude hexagons are related remains a mystery to scientists. “Either a hexagon has spawned spontaneously and identically at two different altitudes, one lower … Read more

SPACE: The Seas of Titan

Seas of Titan

The Saturn system may be the most beautiful in the solar system. As well as its spectacular rings, the Saturn system features more than 50 named moons and dozens of smaller moonlets. The largest of Saturn’s moons, Titan, is larger than the planet Mercury. It has a dense atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and is the only place in the solar system, apart from earth, with seas of liquid at the surface. The seas of Titan are very different from oceans on earth. Instead of water, they are comprised of the hydrocarbons methane and ethane, which are kept liquid by the … Read more

SPACE: New Image of Tethys, Saturn’s “Death Star”

Tethys - Nasa

NASA says it resembles an eyeball. But it’s hard to look at Tethys, one of the moons of Saturn, and not see the Death Star, especially in the image just released by the space agency: That distinctive mark is the Odysseus crater and its surrounding peaks. NASA said: “Like any solar system moon, Tethys (660 miles or 1,062 kilometers across) has suffered many impacts. These impacts are a prime shaper of the appearance of a moon’s surface, especially when the moon has no active geological processes. In this case, a large impact not only created a crater known as Odysseus, … Read more

Cassini Mission to End in Fiery Plunge Into Saturn

Saturn/Titan

Of the 173 known moons orbiting the eight major planets of our solar system, only one ― Saturn’s Titan ― has an atmosphere, lakes and streams. And that’s not all. There’s also speculation that Titan ― half the size of Earth ― could harbor life forms or be a possible future home for Earthlings. The provocative moon was even featured in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, which tells the story of a millionaire on a quest for the ultimate meaning of existence. To study this remarkable moon, NASA launched its Cassini spacecraft in 1997. After maneuvering through … Read more

News: NASA Discovers Global Underground Ocean on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus

Planning a sea-faring vacation to escape from the rest of the world? Don’t discount Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as NASA has just released new research that indicates a global ocean lies underneath its icy surface. Using research from the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft that is scheduled to make a flyby of Enceladus on October 28, NASA was able to detect a slight wobble on the moon that researchers say can only be accounted for by a underground ocean. “This was a hard problem that required years of observations, and calculations involving a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident we finally got … Read more