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The frozen moon is one of the most promising places for extraterrestrial life
The enduring Cassini spacecraft returns with new insight into the hydrocarbon seas from Saturn’s moon Titan. The latest findings were reported after the spacecraft’s most recent flyby above Titan’s northern hemisphere on August 21, where it performed observations of the largest liquid methane/ethane sea, the 400,000 square kilometre Kraken Mare. The Cassini astronomers were looking to probe […]
Earth is not the only place in the solar system to hold watery oceans: Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons also holds a liquid ocean, albeit one that is covered by ice. However, Enceladus is still an extremely exciting place to find extraterrestrial life – not only because of the water it holds, but because water […]
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has detected propylene, a chemical used greatly in everyday life, in things like food-storage containers, car bumpers and other consumer products, on Saturn’s Moon Titan. I really recommend watching the video below, as it explains the situation in great detail: A small amount of propylene was identified in Titan’s lower atmosphere by […]
I’m an absolute fan of the Cassini spacecraft – this is hands down my favorite mission. I mean, it’s been providing us incredibly valuable information for years now, in a very interesting area of our solar system, the Jupiter-Saturn area. This mission is one of the main reasons why we now believe places like Europa […]
During a chance encounter with an unusually strong blast of solar wind at Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected particles being accelerated to ultra-high energies (like those at the LHC); this acceleration is similar to that which takes place around distant supernovas and provides a valuable in-situ study environment. The Cassini spacecraft is an absolutely stunning […]
Iapetus is the third largest moon of Saturn, with a radius of about 42% that of our moon, and a mass that weighs up to only 2.5%. But Iapetus has a number of shocking features, unique throughout the entire solar system. The Walnut Moon This is the equatorial ridge that runs along the center of […]
The Uroburos is a mythological symbol representing a serpent or dragon eating its own tail – a symbol of cyclicality and eternal return. The Cassini spacecraft watching Saturn recently caught a glimpse of a storm that looks remarkably like the mythological creature – only it choked on its own tail. The storm came out incredibly […]
As you may or may not know, we’ve launched a new section of our website: Science Questions and Answers – a section aimed at you guys, where you can ask all questions science-related, and share your knowledge with others. We’re still in the beta version, but please, feel free to ask away – we’ll do […]
Rovers, like Curiosity, have been great for gathering samples and studying the terrain and atmosphere of distant worlds, but what about environments less favorable to wheeled machines? An interesting concept has been unveiled recently, in which scientists propose landing a sort of robotic boat on Titan’s largest methane lake, in order to have a physical […]
Cassini has sent some new remarkable pictures which brilliantly illustrate the difference in size between Saturn and Titan, its largest moon. Saturn dwarfs its moon easily, even though Titan, at 3,200 miles across, is bigger than Earth’s moon, which has a diameter of only 2159 miles. If you look really closely above Saturn’s rings, there […]
