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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Saturn's moon Titan is covered by "dirty" ice ridges and seas of liquid natural gas, a team of scientists said on Friday after a week of research into data from the space probe Huygens. "We've got a flammable world," said Toby Owen, an atmospheric scientist, at a news conference from European Space Agency offices in Paris monitored on NASA (news - web sites) TV. After a seven-year piggyback trip from Earth on board the Saturn probe Cassini, the European-designed Huygens separated in December and fell toward Titan, entering the moon's atmosphere last Friday. The probe, part...

Titan not only has an atmosphere it has hydrocarbon lakes, oceans, sand dunes and now research has just been published proving Saturn's moon is sparkling with electrical activity. Scientists are in general agreement that organic molecules, the precursors to life on Earth, are a consequence of lightning in the atmosphere. Now, using data from the Huygens probe that descended through Titan's atmosphere in 2005 and continued transmitting for 90 minutes after touchdown, Spanish scientists have "unequivocally" proven that Titan has electrical storms too. The presence of electrical activity in the atmosphere is causing much excitement as this could mean that...

Moon probe set for white-knuckle descent By Richard Black BBC science correspondent, in Seattle Scientists have been giving details of the Huygens space probe, which is due to land on Saturn's moon Titan in just under a year's time. The probe, a joint mission between the US and European space agencies, will focus on the oily oceans which researchers believe cover much of the surface. Huygens marks a new stage in man's quest to explore the Solar System. It will be the first time that a craft has landed on a moon other than our own. Depending on where it...

Mars Now, Saturn Moon Titan for Next Robot Lander from Earth By: My Wise County High Knob, Va. --- Amateur astronomers make take notice of the brightness of Saturn in the clear night skies with the "Lord of the Rings" --- the planet Saturn --- brightly shinning and marking the very next stop after Mars for exploring American spacecraft. Just as the Mars Exploration Rovers 'Spirit' and 'Opportunity' have captured American imagination to explore the red planet, next January, 2005 will make an even more remarkable journey through the solar system by a spacecraft landing vehicle to a moon of...

The enigmatic Saturnian moon Titan is still yielding surprising new details years after scientists first pierced its thick haze veil. The vision now emerging of Saturn's largest moon, with its giant dunes and oceanless surface, is perhaps a glimpse of Earth's desert future. "Titan may be very different from Earth today, but maybe not Earth tomorrow," Jonathan Lunine, Cassini-Huygens interdisciplinary scientist at the University of Arizona, told SPACE.com. The surface of Titan was a total mystery before the Huygens probe infiltrated past its dense hazy atmosphere in 2005. After a seven-year voyage aboard the Cassini spacecraft, Huygens spent roughly two-and-a-half...

IF LIFE exists on Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, we could soon know about it - as long as it's the methane-spewing variety. The chemical signature of microbial life could be hidden in readings taken by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe when it landed on Titan in January. Titan's atmosphere is about 5 per cent methane, and Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, thinks that some of it could be coming from methanogens, or methane-producing microbes. Now he and Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, have worked out the likely diet...

The Huygens probe has travelled 789 million miles to the Saturnian system tethered to the Cassini spacecraft. In less than a month's time, it will separate from the mothership and begin its final journey to the surface of the moon, Titan. The probe's journey has taken it more than seven years, but once it enters the atmosphere of the moon, its mission will last for just over four hours. On 13 December, Cassini-Huygens will make another flyby of the moon, Titan, passing just 2,400km away from the surface. On 21 December, the separation unit will be readied, and two...

At 11:25 CET the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) of the National Radio-astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, USA, a part of the global network of radio telescopes involved in tracking the Huygens Titan probe, has detected the probe's 'carrier' (tone) signal. The detection occurred between 11:20 and 11:25 CET, shortly after the probe began its parachute descent through Titan's atmosphere. The extremely feeble signal was first picked up by the Radio Science Receiver supplied by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This signal is an important indication that the Huygens probe is 'alive'. However, it does not contain yet...

FRANKFURT, Germany - A European spacecraft landed in mud when it hit the surface of Titan, a scientist said Tuesday, revealing animated pictures of the final feet of its descent to the moon of Saturn. The latest pictures underline beliefs that the Huygens probe landed near a large body of liquid on Friday when it ended a seven-year mission by the European Space Agency to the previously untouched moon. Another series of photos showed how Titan's hazy atmosphere gave way to a more solid, but clearly varied surface as the spacecraft tumbled and spun toward its final resting place. "There...

Explanation: What would it look like to land on Saturn's moon Titan? The European Space Agency's Huygens probe set down on the Solar System's cloudiest moon in 2005, and a time-lapse video of its descent images was created. Huygens separated from the robotic Cassini spacecraft soon after it achieved orbit around Saturn in late 2004 and began approaching Titan. For two hours after arriving, Huygens plummeted toward Titan's surface, recording at first only the shrouded moon's opaque atmosphere. The computerized truck-tire sized probe soon deployed a parachute to slow its decent, pierced the thick clouds, and began transmitting images of...

Explanation: What do Saturn's rings look like from the dark side? From Earth, we usually see Saturn's rings from the same side of the ring plane that the Sun illuminates them -- one might call this the bright side. Geometrically, in the above picture taken in August by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn, the Sun is behind the camera but on the other side of the ring plane. Such a vantage point gives a breathtaking views of the most splendid ring system in the Solar System. Strangely, the rings have similarities to a photographic negative of a front...

The international Cassini mission has spotted what appears to be a miniature extraterrestrial version of the Nile River: a river valley on Saturn’s moon Titan that stretches more than 400 km from its ‘headwaters’ to a large sea. It is the first time images have revealed a river system this vast and in such high resolution anywhere beyond Earth. Scientists deduce that the river is filled with liquid because it appears dark along its entire extent in the high-resolution radar image, indicating a smooth surface. “Though there are some short, local meanders, the relative straightness of the river valley suggests...

Are you ready for this? I know… WOW. This swirling maelstrom of clouds is what was seen over Saturn’s north pole earlier today, November 27, by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This is a raw image, acquired in polarized light, from a distance of 238,045 miles (383,097 kilometers)… all I did was remove some of the hot pixels that are commonly found on Cassini images taken with longer exposures. Again… WOW. My attempt at a color composite can be seen below, plus another treat: It’s rough, and a little muddy because the clouds were moving between image channels (not to mention the...

Explanation: What's happening over the south pole of Titan? A vortex of haze appears to be forming, although no one is sure why. The above natural-color image shows the light-colored feature. The vortex was found on images taken last month when the robotic Cassini spacecraft flew by the unusual atmosphere-shrouded moon of Saturn. Cassini was only able to see the southern vortex because its orbit around Saturn was recently boosted out of the plane where the rings and moons move. Clues as to what created the enigmatic feature are accumulating, including that Titan's air appears to be sinking in the...

Explanation: Although its colors may be subtle, Saturn's moon Helene is an enigma in any light. The moon was imaged in unprecedented detail last June as the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn swooped to within a single Earth diameter of the diminutive moon. Although conventional craters and hills appear, the above image also shows terrain that appears unusually smooth and streaked. Planetary astronomers are inspecting these detailed images of Helene to glean clues about the origin and evolution of the 30-km across floating iceberg. Helene is also unusual because it circles Saturn just ahead of the large moon Dione, making...

Explanation: Get out your red/blue glasses and float next to Helene, small, icy moon of Saturn. Appropriately named, Helene is one of four known Trojan moons, so called because it orbits at a Lagrange point. A Lagrange point is a gravitationally stable position near two massive bodies, in this case Saturn and larger moon Dione. In fact, irregularly shaped ( about 36 by 32 by 30 kilometers) Helene orbits at Dione's leading Lagrange point while brotherly ice moon Polydeuces follows at Dione's trailing Lagrange point. The sharp stereo anaglyph was constructed from two Cassini images (N00172886, N00172892) captured during the...

Nasa's Cassini probe has scooped oxygen from the thin atmosphere of Rhea – the first time the gas has been detected directly on another worldA spacecraft has tasted oxygen in the atmosphere of another world for the first time while flying low over Saturn's icy moon, Rhea. Nasa's Cassini probe scooped oxygen from the thin atmosphere of the planet's moon while passing overhead at an altitude of 97km in March this year. Until now, wisps of oxygen have only been detected on planets and their moons indirectly, using the Hubble space telescope and other major facilities.

There is something around the moon of Rhea. It's not a ring, and it sure is weird, say researchers.Back in 2005, a suite of six instruments on the Cassini spacecraft detected what was thought to be an extensive debris disk around Saturn's moon Rhea, and while there was no visible evidence, researchers thought that perhaps there was a diffuse ring around the moon. This would have been the first ring ever found around a moon. New observations, however, have nixed the idea of a ring, but there's still something around Rhea that is causing a strange, symmetrical structure in the...

The rings of Saturn are the most intricate planetary decorations in our solar system, but are also cosmic gems festooned with unknown red material and some tricky dynamic forces that shape them. The Cassini probe has been studying the gas giant Saturn since its arrival at the gas giant in June 2004. Over that time, Cassini has studied not only Saturn's awe-inspiring rings, but also its atmosphere, moons and the magnetic shield that surrounds it. The discoveries that Cassini has made in its six years of close Saturn inspection, as well as the many mysteries of the planet left to...

I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby. This first one I put together from two of the south polar plume images – you can see all four of the tiger stripes, and the plumes issuing from them, in this wide shot. I mosaicked two images, matching their levels, rotated them 180 degrees to put "ground" at the bottom and "sky" at the top, and filled in a little of the background in the corner at lower right to fill out the whole image. Enceladan south polar vents...