NASA's Video Journey to Saturn's Moons -A Galaxy Insight

"I was really spooked in early 2005, when the Huygens probe returned sound recordings from the surface of Titan. This is exactly what I had described in my novel Imperial Earth, where my character is listening to the winds blowing over the desert plains."

Arthur C. Clarke -author of 2001 -A Space Odyssey.

"I'm going to take you on a journey," promises NASA planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, and that she does, taking us on breathtaking tour de force of the Cassini voyage to Saturn she deliver at the '07 TED Conference in Monterey, California.

"Saturn" says Todd Barber of the NASA's Jet Propoulsion Lab, "is the gem of our Solar System."

Discovered in 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, Saturn's moon Titan is the biggest of the 48 known moons orbiting the ringed planet. It is a cold world enclosed by a thick, hazy atmosphere impenetrable by telescopes and cameras.

Titan is of great interest to scientists because it is the only moon in the solar system known to have clouds and a mysterious, thick, planet-like atmosphere.

In 1980, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft tried to take close up images of the natural features of Titan's landscape but was unable to penetrate the thick clouds. Instead, the images showed only slight color and brightness variations in the atmosphere. Titan's atmospheric pressure is about 60 percent greater than Earth's - roughly the same pressure found at the bottom of a swimming pool.

NASA's Cassini-Huygens spacecraft (currently orbiting Saturn) has cast a bright new light on Titan's mysteries. The spacecraft's instruments are designed to reveal many of Titan's characteristics.

Combined with the "big picture" information that the Cassini orbiter will collect during Titan flybys, data from the Huygens probe will provide scientists with critical information that may shed light on ancient questions such as "Where did we come from?" And, "How did the planets form?"

Because of the extremely cold temperatures typical of celestial bodies that are that far away from the Sun, the structure of Titan's chemical atmosphere is in a state of deep freeze. It is this chemical composition that interests scientists a great deal because Titan's atmosphere might consist of compounds similar to those present in the primordial days of the Earth's atmosphere. Titan's thick cloudy atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth's, but may contain much higher percentages of "smog-like" chemicals such as methane and ethane. The smog may be so thick that it actually rains "gasoline-like" liquids. The organic nature of some of the chemicals found in Titan's atmosphere might indicate that this fascinating moon could harbor some form of life.

Earth and Saturn's moon Titan show striking similarities because both occupy "sweet spots" in our Solar System. Many of the natural processes that occur on Earth also take place on this moon, say scientists participating in the US-European Cassini-Huygens mission, with wind, rain, volcanism and tectonic activity all seem to play a role in shaping Titan's surface.

One scientist even sees a way that life could survive on the freezing world.

"Titan is perhaps the most Earth-like place in the Solar System other than Earth, in terms of the balance of processes," says Jonathan Lunine, of the University of Arizona, US in an interview with the BBC, who is an interdisciplinary scientist for Cassini-Huygens. "Wind-driven processes, river channels, evidence of rain, possible lakes and geological features that may have to do with volcanism and tectonism."

But the chemistry that drives these processes is radically different between the two worlds. For example, methane seems to perform many of the same roles on Titan that water plays on Earth. Dr Lunine believes that Earth and Titan both have similar processes occurring because they occupy "sweet spots" in the Solar System, striking a balance between size, or mass, and distance from the Sun.

The Cassini-Huygens flyby in late February 2007, provided the discovery of liquid hydrocarbon lakes near Titan's north pole. These are the only large, stable bodies of surface liquid known to exist anywhere other than Earth -one sea with an area of over 100,000 square kilometers (larger than Lake Superior), and another region potentially the size of the Caspian Sea.

The European Space Agency recently reported that sensors on Cassini-Huygens Atmosphere Structure Instrument detected a mysterious extremely low frequency (ELF) radio wave during the descent. It was oscillating very slowly for a radio wave, just 36 times a second, and increased slightly in frequency as the probe reached lower altitudes.

If it's confirmed that the signal is a natural phenomenon and not a result of the way the instrument worked, they will have discovered a powerful new way to probe not just the atmosphere of Titan but its subsurface as well.

Porco and a team of scientists from NASA and the European Space Agency have been analyzing the images that Cassini has been sending back since it left Earth in 1999. They've found many new rings and four new moons (so far). And they've produced breathtaking images and animations of the stormy face of Saturn, its busy rings, and its jumble of moons and moonlets.

Don't miss this stunning video by Carolyn Porco focusing on Saturn's intriguing largest moon, Titan, with deserts, mudflats and puzzling lakes, and on frozen Enceladus, which appears to shoot massive geysers of ice.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

NASA's Cassini Voyage to Saturn Video

Comments

I kept thinking about the other article where the geologist said that a earth sized planet is the only capable to make "emerge oxygen", could a moon has the same pressure and heat internally due to the gravitational forces to make it so too?. I know it should be very difficult with Titan or a moon in the solar system but in other places of the galaxy.....

Posted by: jer35_mx | October 05, 2007 at 05:56 PM