Great Image: Titan's Shining Seas

While exoplanets are the interest du jour, our own solar system continues to fascinate. Take Titan, Saturn's moon and the subject of numerous Cassini spacecraft observations as well as investigation by the Huygens probe 10 years ago.  The image above shows an artificially colors view of the moon's methane seas taken last summer (our summer, that is).  One more intriguing feature in the far reaches of our solar system that Cassini continues to monitor for our behalf.

Here is NASA's story concerning the image:

Why would the surface of Titan light up with a blinding flash? The reason: a sunglint from liquid seas. Saturn's moon Titan has numerous smooth lakes of methane that numerous passes of our Solar System's most mysterious moon, Cassini has revealed Titan to be a world with active weather -- including times when it rains a liquefied version of natural gas.

Image Credit: VIMS Team, Univerity of Arizona, ESA, NASA

Bing Brings you Saturn

Today's homepage image on Bing was an image of Saturn taken by the Cassini probe.  I cannot remember the last time Bing highlighted an astronomy issue like this (though I am sure it happens and I just missed it).  Here is the story that goes along with today's image:

The sixth planet in our solar system, Saturn, with its distinctive rings, is probably the most recognizable planet after Earth—at least to us Earthlings. A NASA spacecraft called Cassini-Huygens took this photo. The craft’s sole mission was to fly directly to Saturn and then explore the planet as well as its rings and moons.

A recent discovery on one of Saturn’s smaller moons, Enceladus, has scientists clamoring for more information. Data collected by Cassini-Huygens has revealed a body of water, probably about the size of Lake Superior, below the moon’s surface. The discovery of water has suddenly made Enceladus a prime target in the search for life beyond Earth, since water is the basis for all life as we know it.

That discovery may prompt scientists to launch an additional satellite to Saturn, but it would be years before data would reach Earth. Saturn’s far away. Really far away. About 745 million miles away when Earth and Saturn are at their closest. Okay, that doesn’t mean anything to us, either, but consider, for example, that Cassini-Huygens launched in 1997, but didn’t enter Saturn’s orbit until 2004. We could be waiting awhile before learning if we have neighbors in the solar system.

Image Credit per Bing: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

Great Image: The Storm on Saturn That Ate Itself

This Cassini image captures a massive storm on the surface of Saturn that lasted about 267 days before petering out last summer.  Here is a little more on the storm from NASA:

In a new paper that provides the most detail yet about the life and death of a monstrous thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn, scientists from NASA's Cassini mission describe how the massive storm churned around the planet until it encountered its own tail and sputtered out. It is the first time scientists have observed a storm consume itself in this way anywhere in the solar system.

"This Saturn storm behaved like a terrestrial hurricane - but with a twist unique to Saturn," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, who is a co-author on the new paper in the journal Icarus. "Even the giant storms at Jupiter don't consume themselves like this, which goes to show that nature can play many awe-inspiring variations on a theme and surprise us again and again." 

By Aug. 28, after 267 days, the Saturn storm stopped thundering for good. While Cassini's infrared detectors continue to track some lingering effects in higher layers of Saturn's atmosphere, the troposphere -- which is the weather-producing layer, lower in the atmosphere - has been quiet at that latitude. 

"This thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn was a beast," said Kunio Sayanagi, the paper's lead author and a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia. "The storm maintained its intensity for an unusually long time. The storm head itself thrashed for 201 days, and its updraft erupted with an intensity that would have sucked out the entire volume of Earth's atmosphere in 150 days. And it also created the largest vortex ever observed in the troposphere of Saturn, expanding up to 7,500 miles [12,000 kilometers] across."

Notes on Cassini:  The mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.  At the time of launch, Cassini-Huygens had two parts - the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens probe. In 2004, Cassini-Huygens reached Saturn and its moons. At that point, the Cassini spacecraft began orbiting the system in July 2004, while Huygens entered the murky atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, and descended via parachute onto its surface.