Posted on 07/10/2012 6:31:53 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A NASA spacecraft has spied a vortex swirling in the atmosphere high above the south pole of the Saturn moon Titan, hinting that winter may be coming to the huge body's southern reaches.
NASA's Cassini probe photographed the polar vortex or mass of swirling gas during a flyby of Titan on June 27. The vortex appears to complete one full rotation in nine hours, while it takes Titan about 16 days to spin once around its axis.
"The structure inside the vortex is reminiscent of the open cellular convection that is often seen over Earth's oceans," Tony Del Genio, a Cassini team member at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said in a statement.
"Shocking" Horscopes www.PremiumAstrology.comInsert your birthdate & get answers about Past, Present & Future. Free.Behavioral Science Course Colleges.AllColleges.orgBehavioral Science Colleges. Find Onlne & Local Colleges Now!Solar Light Super Sale www.SolarLightStore.comLargest Selection of Solar Lights on the Web. Low Prices & 30% Off!Ads by Google "But unlike on Earth, where such layers are just above the surface, this one is at very high altitude, maybe a response of Titan's stratosphere to seasonal cooling as southern winter approaches," he added. "But so soon in the game, we're not sure."
When Cassini arrived at the Saturn system in 2004, Titan which is 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) wide had a vortex and a visible "hood" of relatively dense haze high above its north pole. It was winter there until Saturn's August 2009 equinox, which marked the arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere and fall in the southern reaches of the planet and its many moons.
While Titan's northern hood still remains, the circulation in the upper atmosphere has been moving from the warming north pole to the cooling south, researchers said. This shift appears to be causing downwellings over Titan's south pole, along with the formation of high-altitude haze and a vortex there.
Cassini's cameras first noticed the nascent southern hazes in March, and the spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS) captured false-color images on May 22 and June 7.
"VIMS has seen a concentration of aerosols forming about 200 miles above the surface of Titan's south pole," said Christophe Sotin, a VIMS team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen aerosols here at this level before, so we know this is something new."
Ok, FWIW, it looks to me like an embryo.
>>I suppose that if this was happening on earth it would be blamed on "greehouse gases."
It comes from an accidental reading of ancient texts.
Poor Ash...sent back to Medieval times to fight the Deadites.
ping
“It’s all those alien asthma inhalers and SUVs.” ~ Al Goron
Bush’s fault.
Someone has finally found “the tubes”. Everything is going down the tubes!
Thanks martin_fierro. It's been a busy night for the C list.
|
Was he headed to the Deadites at that point? If the chronology is right, he would seem to be missing his chainsaw.
He’s not wearing the same clothes either, and has both hands. Maybe it’s from Evil Dead 1?
That’s the quantum physics law of the universe, when all else fails it’s “Bush’s Fault”.
it’s a hole in the ozone caused by men from earth using too much r-12
That was a Peanuts cartoon. Snoopy was holding what looked like a pair of paper towel tubes and said, "These are the actual tubes ..." that everything goes down, etc.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.