Archive
New Computer Model Explains Lakes and Storms on Titan
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is an intriguing, alien world that’s covered in a thick atmosphere with abundant methane. With an average surface temperature of a brisk -300 degrees Fahrenheit (about 90 kelvins) and a diameter just less than half of Earth’s, Titan boasts methane clouds and fog, as well as rainstorms and plentiful lakes of liquid methane. It’s the only place in the solar system, other than Earth, that has large bodies of liquid on its surface.
The origins of many of these features, however, remain puzzling to scientists. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a computer model of Titan’s atmosphere and methane cycle that, for the first time, explains many of these phenomena in a relatively simple and coherent way.
In particular, the new model explains three baffling observations of Titan. One oddity was that Titan’s methane lakes tend to cluster around its poles and that there are more lakes in the northern hemisphere than in the south.
Secondly, the areas at low latitudes, near Titan’s equator, are known to be dry, lacking lakes and regular precipitation. But when the Huygens probe landed on Titan in 2005, it saw channels carved out by flowing liquid-possibly runoff from rain. And in 2009, Caltech researchers discovered raging storms that may have brought rain to this supposedly dry region.
Finally, scientists uncovered a third mystery when they noticed that clouds observed over the past decade—during summer in Titan’s southern hemisphere—cluster around southern middle and high latitudes.
Full Story: http://news.caltech.edu/press_releases/13484
NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity Begins Study of Martian Crater
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The initial work of NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity at its new location on Mars shows surface compositional differences from anything the robot has studied in its first 7.5 years of exploration.
Opportunity arrived three weeks ago at the rim of a 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) crater named Endeavour. The first rock it examined is flat-topped and about the size of a footstool. It was apparently excavated by an impact that dug a crater the size of a tennis court into the crater’s rim. The rock was informally named “Tisdale 2.”
Full Story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-274
Jupiter-Bound Space Probe Captures Earth And Moon
This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) was taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft on Aug. 26, 2011, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
On its way to the biggest planet in the solar system — Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft took time to capture its home planet and its natural satellite — the moon.
“This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves.”
The image was taken by the spacecraft’s camera, JunoCam, on Aug. 26 when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. The image was taken as part of the mission team’s checkout of the Juno spacecraft. The team is conducting its initial detailed checks on the spacecraft’s instruments and subsystems after its launch on Aug. 5.
Full Story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-271
Astronomers Find Ice and Possibly Methane on Snow White, a Distant Dwarf Planet
An artist's conception of 2007 OR10, nicknamed Snow White. Astronomers suspect that its rosy color is due to the presence of irradiated methane. Credit: NASA
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered that the dwarf planet 2007 OR10—nicknamed Snow White—is an icy world, with about half its surface covered in water ice that once flowed from ancient, slush-spewing volcanoes. The new findings also suggest that the red-tinged dwarf planet may be covered in a thin layer of methane, the remnants of an atmosphere that’s slowly being lost into space.
Full Story: http://news.caltech.edu/press_releases/13445
A Hint of Higgs: An Update from the LHC
The CMS detector at the LHC weighs in at 14,000 metric tons.
The physics world was abuzz with some tantalizing news a couple of weeks ago. At a meeting of the European Physical Society in Grenoble, France, physicists—including some from Caltech—announced that the latest data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might hint at the existence of the ever-elusive Higgs boson.
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