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The exact location of jets on Saturn's geologically active moon Enceladus have been found -- a discovery scientists are calling a "mother lode." NASA's Cassini flyby mission released new photos this week of icy jets erupting from the surface. The green areas... are believed to represent deposits of coarser-grained ice and solid boulders. Some of the material is concentrated along valley floors and walls, as well as along the upraised flanks of the "tiger stripe" fractures. The photo also reveals a sinuous boundary of scarps and ridges that encircles the south polar terrain. Here, the ice may be blocky rubble...

Australian astronomers may have found a solution to how far-away Jupiter and Saturn drive the sun's solar cycle. In a paper published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, astronomer Dr Ian Wilson and colleagues from the University of Southern Queensland, suggest Jupiter and Saturn affect the sun's movement and its rotation, and hence its sunspot activity. Every 11 years the sun undergoes a period of intense solar activity, marked by flares, coronal mass ejections and sunspots. This period is known as the solar maximum and occurs twice each solar, or Hale, cycle. "The sun can be thought...

HEAVENLY TRIANGLE: Ringed planet, first-magnitude star, crescent moon. Add them all together and you get a heavenly triangle visible tonight. Look up after sunset for Saturn, Regulus and the Moon in scalene formation. http://spaceweather.com/ [note: First, all of this is naked-eye visible (no, you do not need to remove your clothes to see it!). Next, Saturn (in the diagram above) is the large blue dot. They apparently forgot to label it. Saturn will appear brighter and somewhat 'yellowish' compared to the nearby white star Regulus just to its lower right (Saturn is brighter than the star). Mars, a bit further...

PASADENA, Calif. - New observations by a spacecraft suggest Saturn's second-largest moon may be surrounded by rings. If confirmed, it would the first time a ring system has been found around a moon. The international Cassini spacecraft detected what appeared to be a large debris disk around the 950-mile-wide moon Rhea during a flyby in 2005. Scientists proposed that the halo likely contained particles ranging from the size of grains to boulders. The finding was described in a study published in the March 7 issue of the journal Science. Unlike the rings around Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, the apparent...

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory...

January 15, 2008 Buying a hybrid is currently a pastime for early adopters and those who are prepared to pay to salve their environmental conscience . Do the return-on-investment (ROI) math and you’ll realize that the fuel savings never bridge the economic rationale gap because of the higher initial cost of hybrids. That appears about to change! Ultra-capacitor-based energy storage systems have long promised a breakthrough for the automotive industry and AFS Trinity’s announcement of the real world performance specs of its plug-in hybrid system is landmark. The company’s patent-pending Extreme Hybrid (XH) technology employs a proprietary dual energy storage...

Sounds from outer space are weird, if not downright spooky. Be ready for a goosebump or two as you feast your ears on some of the greatest sounds gathered during the exploration of the Saturnian system. To play the sounds and for more information about them, click on the links below.

Mystery of Saturn's Two-Faced Moon Solved Jeanna Bryner Staff Writer SPACE.com Tue Oct 9, 8:45 AM ET Saturn's moon Iapetus has virtually no gray. Rather, its features are all stark black and white. The appearance has long puzzled astronomers. New detailed images suggest sunlight is melting ice on one side of Iapetus, leaving the moon's dark surface exposed, while the opposite half retains its reflective ice-mixed shell. Since the moon's discovery by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1671, Iapetus' appearance has baffled astronomers. The leading edge of Iapetus, which faces the direction of its orbit, is black as asphalt, while its...

PASADENA, Calif. – Scientists on the Cassini mission to Saturn are poring through hundreds of images returned from the Sept. 10 flyby of Saturn's two-toned moon Iapetus. Pictures returned late Tuesday and early Wednesday show the moon's yin and yang--a white hemisphere resembling snow, and the other as black as tar. Images show a surface that is heavily cratered, along with the mountain ridge that runs along the moon's equator. Many of the close-up observations focused on studying the strange 20-kilometer high (12 mile) mountain ridge that gives the moon a walnut-shaped appearance. "The images are really stunning," said Tilmann...

Video greeting to NASA JPL to mark the Iapetus flyby of Cassini spacecraft -- Sept. 10, 2007 by Arthur C. Clarke (The following is a transcript of the video greeting.) Hello! This is Arthur Clarke, joining you from my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. I'm delighted to be part of this event to mark Cassini's flyby of Iapetus. I send my greetings to all my friends - known and unknown - who are gathered for this important occasion. I only wish I could be with you, but I'm now completely wheelchaired by Polio and have no plans to leave Sri...

Saturn's vast and majestic ring system has its own atmosphere - separate from that of the planet itself, according to data from the Cassini spacecraft. And Saturn is rotating seven minutes more slowly than when probes measured its spin in the 70s and 80s - an observation experts cannot yet explain... By making close flybys of the ring system, Cassini has been able to determine that the atmosphere around the rings is composed principally of molecular oxygen (O2)... "The INMS sees the neutral oxygen gas, Caps sees the ionised products of that oxygen and the electrons associated with it. There...

The new moon could be related to Methone and Pallene A new moon has been discovered orbiting Saturn - bringing the planet's latest moon tally up to 60.The body was spotted in a series of images taken by cameras onboard the Cassini spacecraft. Initial calculations suggest the moon is about 2km-wide (1.2 miles) and its orbit sits between those of two other Saturnian moons, Methone and Pallene. The Cassini Imaging Team, who found the object, said Saturn's moon count could rise further still. New family The moon appears as a dim speck in images taken by the Cassini probe's...

ALBUQUERQUE, March 19 (UPI) -- U.S. government scientists have developed technology that can turn water into ice in nanoseconds. Researchers at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, however, caution the ice is hotter than the boiling point of water. "The three phases of water as we know them --cold ice, room temperature liquid and hot vapor -- are actually only a small part of water's repertory of states," said Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. "Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase (ice) than maintain the more energetic liquid...

One of the most bizarre weather patterns known has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole. Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon. The honeycomb-like feature has been seen before. NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting oddity. "This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines,...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of huge seas -- one of them bigger than any of North America's Great Lakes -- on Saturn's largest moon, scientists said on Tuesday. Scientists studying the images taken by the probe, which blasted off a decade ago, said the seas on Titan were likely filled with liquid methane or ethane and that the discovery reinforced previous theories. "We've long hypothesized about oceans on Titan, and now with multiple instruments we have a first indication of seas that dwarf the lakes seen previously," said Jonathan Lunine, a University of Arizona...

The Cassini radar image (left) shows one of Titan's seas is larger than Lake Superior (right) Nasa's Cassini probe has found evidence for seas, probably filled with liquid hydrocarbons, at the high northern latitudes of Saturn's moon Titan.The dark features, detected by Cassini's radar, are much bigger than any lakes already detected on Titan. The largest is some 100,000 sq km (39,000 sq miles) - greater in extent than North America's Lake Superior. It covers a greater fraction of Titan than the proportion of Earth covered by the Black Sea. The Black Sea is the Earth's largest inland sea...

Step aside, Europa. Make way, Titan. Saturn's small moon Enceladus is becoming one of the hottest places to look for signs of life in the chilly outer solar system. NASA's Cassini spacecraft recently discovered that a giant plume of water vapor, dust, and small ice crystals shoots out from a crack-lined region in the southern hemisphere of this 500-kilometer-wide moon. Observations of the plume and surrounding material on the moon's surface suggest that Enceladus harbors the basic ingredients necessary for life as we know it.

Astronomers have recently discovered that their earlier “explanation” for anomalous heating of Saturn’s upper atmosphere doesn’t work. The temperatures of the upper atmospheres of giant planets have long presented a conundrum to astronomers. They are hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight, and other attempts to explain the temperature anomalies in mechanical terms have met with failure. The electrical theorists suggest that such problems will persist as long as astronomers ignore electricity. Since the giant planets display spectacular auroras at their polar regions, scientists believed that these auroras generated heat that was somehow directed toward the planets' equators. On...

The international Cassini spacecraft has beamed back to Earth never-before-seen angles of Saturn from high above and below its majestic rings. The planet is fully surrounded by the rings in images released Thursday by NASA. "Finally, here are the views that we've waited years for," Cassini scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement. "It just doesn't look like the same place. It's so utterly breathtaking, it almost gives you vertigo," Porco said. Cassini snapped the images while in a highly inclined orbit during the past two months. The $3.3 billion Cassini mission,...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured never-before-seen views of Saturn from perspectives high above and below the planet's rings. Over the last several months, the spacecraft has climbed to higher and higher inclinations, providing its cameras with glimpses of the planet and rings that have scientists gushing.

UCL researchers have reported findings in the journal 'Nature' that rule out a long-held theory about why the Gas Giants like Saturn have such hot outer atmospheres... A simple calculation to give the expected temperature of a planet's upper atmosphere balances the amount of sunlight absorbed by the energy lost to the lower atmosphere. However, the calculated values don't tally with the actual observations of the gas giants - they are consistently much hotter... The UCL team was investigating this redistribution when they reached their surprising conclusion. By using numerical models of Saturn's atmosphere, the researchers found that there, the...

The sun, it turns out, isn't yellow. The earth isn't a perfect sphere. Asteroids can and do have moons. Saturn will soon (in 100 million years, anyway) be shorn of its rings. The equinoxes do not consist of exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. Intergalactic space is so empty of matter that a random cube of it, "200,000 kilometers on a side, contains about the same number of atoms as the air that fills the usable volume of your refrigerator." ...Dark energy, dark matter, the failures of string theory, the origins of life -- Tyson happily...

Sometime around 2012, Cassini, like the ocean-going ships of old, will need to be decommissioned. However, the spacecraft cannot be towed to some nearby shore to be dismantled; she must either drop anchor, be scuttled, or cast off her gravitational moorings altogether... The third option: raise anchor and escape the Saturn system altogether. Such a maneuver would require numerous flybys of Saturn's largest moon Titan to sling the spacecraft free of the ringed planet's environs. If Cassini were to be cut adrift in this manner, her controllers have two further choices: either bring her sunward or let her escape deeper...

A freaky storm two-thirds the diameter of Earth and unlike anything ever seen has been spotted on Saturn. The tempest, some 5,000 miles wide (8,000 kilometers), has an oddly human-looking hurricane-like eye [image]. But it is very different from a terrestrial hurricane, scientists said today. NASA's Cassini spacecraft photographed the huge storm. It swirls with 350 mph winds at the ringed planet's south pole. It has a remarkably well-defined eye ringed by clouds that soar 20 to 45 miles high (30 to 75 kilometers), or up to five times taller than hurricane clouds on Earth. "It looks like a hurricane,...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has seen something never before seen on another planet -- a hurricane-like storm at Saturn's south pole with a well-developed eye, ringed by towering clouds. The "hurricane" spans a dark area inside a thick, brighter ring of clouds. It is approximately 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) across, or two thirds the diameter of Earth. "It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane," said Dr. Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "Whatever it is, we're going to focus on the eye of this storm and find...

In our Solar System, four planets stand out for their sheer mass and size. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune indeed qualify as "giant planets" because they are larger than any terrestrial planet and much more massive than all other objects in the Solar System, except the Sun, put together. According to Dr. Guillot, "the giant planets, because of their gravitational might, they have played a key role in the formation of the Solar System, tossing around many objects in the system, preventing the formation of a planet in what is now the asteroid belt, and directly leading to the formation...

NASA finds Saturn's moons may be creating new rings NASA/JPL NEWS RELEASE Posted: October 11, 2006 Cassini scientists are on the trail of the missing moons of Saturn. A recent observation by the spacecraft leads them to believe that they will find the moons near newly discovered rings around the planet. With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun's blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world. This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by...

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - New images from the Cassini space probe show Saturn being adorned by a 60,000-kilometer (37,000-mile) "string of pearls", NASA scientists announced. A statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said the "pearls" seen in a stunning infra-red image were actually clearings in Saturn's deep cloud system. It is the first time such large cloud clearings have been observed around Saturn, indicating that they may be a result of a large planetary cloud formation that might encircle the whole planet. Cassini was launched in October 1997, carrying with it the...

This lake is part of a larger image taken by the Cassini radar instrument during a flyby of Saturn's moon Titan on Sept. 23, 2006. It shows clear shorelines that are reminiscent of terrestrial lakes. With Titan's colder temperatures and hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere, however, the lakes likely contain a combination of methane and ethane, not water. Centered near 74 degrees north, 65 degrees west longitude, this lake is roughly 20 kilometers by 25 kilometers (12 to 16 miles) across. It features several narrow or angular bays, including a broad peninsula that on Earth would be evidence that the surrounding terrain...

LOS ANGELES - Saturn's majestic ring system, visible through backyard telescopes, just got a little more crowded with the discovery of a faint, new ring encircling the giant planet, scientists said Tuesday. The international Cassini spacecraft beamed back images this week showing the new ring, located inside the outermost E ring. The new ring crosses the orbits of the Saturn moons Janus and Epimetheus, leading scientists to believe tiny particles from the lunar surfaces gave rise to the ring. Saturn has seven major rings named A through G, although they are not arrayed in alphabetical order. The planet has about...

KANSAS CITY, Kan. - Saturn showed off its sleek new mid-size Aura on Wednesday, with company officials saying they hope its European-inspired design will entice customers back to the brand for General Motors Corp., which has been fighting slumping sales in the U.S. The Aura sedan is being built at GM's Fairfax plant in Kansas City, Kan., and Saturn hopes to have the cars on sales lots by July 24. Prices have not yet been announced. "This is a very important vehicle for General Motors," Jill Lajdziak, Saturn general manager, told Saturn officials, retailers employees and news media. "This vehicle...

Battlestar Galactica took home three Saturn Awards May 2 at the 32nd annual gala in Universal City, California. The series won for Best Syndicated/Cable Television Series. Top actors, producers, and production companies attended to also see James Callis ("Dr. Gaius Baltar") and Katee Sackhoff ("Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace" take home awards for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress on television. The top television prize for broadcast networks went to Lost, this year's Best Network Television Series. SCI FI's The Triangle also tied with Masters of Horror for Best Television Presentation. The Academy of Science Fiction Fantasy and Horror was founded...

Recent images of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, bear a striking resemblance to some of the deserts on Earth. The pictures, captured by the Cassini spacecraft as it flew by Titan last October and released today, show sand dunes at Titan's equator much like those in the Sahara desert. "It's bizarre," said Ralph Lorenz of University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "These images from a moon of Saturn look just like radar images of Namibia or Arabia." On Earth, all wind is ultimately a result of heat differences produced by sunlight that warms the planet unevenly. Scientists have long assumed...

<p>Although it was never publicly acknowledged during the existence of the Soviet Union, the Soviets did plan a program to land cosmonauts on the Moon comparable to the Apollo landings. Such missions were seen as a logical continuation of the Space Race that had begun when Sputnik was launched in 1957. However, the Soviets were forced to abandon their lunar program following a string of failures from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. The Soviets then attempted to conceal their lack of success by claiming that no such program had ever existed in the first place.</p>

BOULDER, Colorado—The discovery of apparent liquid water reservoirs erupting in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus has produced a gusher of questions. One leading unknown to solve: Could liquid water residing within a body so small and so cold provide comfort-level conditions suitable for living organisms? NASA announced last month that high-resolution Cassini images of Enceladus show icy jets and lofty plumes that expel large quantities of particles at high speed. Scientists think the jets spout from near-surface pockets of liquid water, super-cold versions of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone.

Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have found evidence that a new class of small moonlets resides within Saturn's rings. There may be as many as 10 million of these objects within one of Saturn's rings alone. The moonlets' existence could help answer the question of whether Saturn's rings were formed through the break-up of a larger body or are the remnants of the disk of material from which Saturn and its moons formed. "These moonlets are likely to be chunks of the ancient body whose break-up produced Saturn's glorious rings," said Joseph Burns of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., a co-author...

Am I the only person with a scientific background that finds it perplexing that secular scientists have absolutely no difficulty suggesting the possibility of bizarre micro-organism life-forms (prokaryotes) existing on a small frozen moon in outer space, but are totally unable to denote or acknowledge a human zygote or embryo in the womb as a living organism solely for the murderous purpose of killing an unborn child? Imagine the universal condemnation and rebuke you would suffer if you suggested terminating some extra-terrestrial bacterium's life-force. But an unborn child? No problem! Hypocritical and disgusting!

The potential discovery of water on one of Saturn's moons would add a new environment in the solar system where life could exist, according to scientists. NASA's Cassini spacecraft made the surprising find on Enceladus during its mission around Saturn and the ringed planet's natural satellites. The probe may have found evidence of liquid water that erupts like geysers from Yellowstone park in the western United States, NASA said Thursday. "The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon," NASA said. "We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that...

LOS ANGELES - The orbiting Cassini spacecraft has spotted what appear to be water geysers on one of Saturn's icy moons, raising the tantalizing possibility that the celestial object harbors life. The surprising images from the moon Enceladus represent some of the most direct and dramatic evidence yet of liquid water beyond the Earth. Previous claims have been mostly circumstantial, based on scientists' analysis of rocks and other indirect data. Excited by the discovery, some scientists said Enceladus should be added to the short list of places within the solar system most likely to have extraterrestrial life. Cassini recently snapped...

DETROIT -- For the first time in nine years, all of the top picks in Consumer Reports' annual vehicle guide are made by Japanese automakers. The Honda Civic is the magazine's top small sedan, while the Toyota Highlander Hybrid is the top mid-sized sport utility vehicle, according to results released Wednesday. Vehicles from Nissan Motor Co. and Subaru, a division of Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd., round out the top picks in 10 categories. Asian brands also fared best in the magazine's survey of vehicle reliability. Toyota Motor Corp.'s Lexus brand was first, while Honda was second and the Toyota brand...

The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films has released its nominations for the 32nd Saturn Awards, to be given out May 2, 2006 in Universal City, California. The Stargate franchise picked up a total of four nominations in this year's prestigious genre awards. Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis were both nominated in the Best Syndicated/Cable TV Series category, just as they were last year. SG-1 has won the award three times -- in 2000, 2004, and 2005. Other contenders include Battlestar Galactica, The Closer, The 4400, and Nip/Tuck. Ben Browder (Cameron Mitchell) received a nomination in the Best...

NASA has spotted an enormous thunderstorm on the night side of Saturn, the space agency announced this week. Radio signals suggest that the storm's lightning bolts are a thousand times more powerful than those that accompany Earth storms. Though small storms are common on Saturn, tempests large enough to emit radio waves are rare. The unusually powerful storm stretches some 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) from north to south. It's located in a region of Saturn dubbed Storm Alley because of its high atmospheric activity (wallpaper: stunning Saturn image). NASA's orbiting Cassini spacecraft picked up lightning-generated radio noise from the storm...

More than 1.3 billion kilometers away from Earth, the Cassini space probe is beaming back sensational images of Saturn and its moons. Two women have been particularly crucial to the mission's success: one is controlling the craft and the other is taking pictures.

Cassini Images Reveal Spectacular Evidence Of An Active Moon Recent Cassini images of Saturn's moon Enceladus backlit by the sun show the fountain-like sources of the fine spray of material that towers over the south polar region. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 07, 2005Jets of fine, icy particles streaming from Saturn's moon Enceladus were captured in recent images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The images provide unambiguous visual evidence that the moon is geologically active. "For planetary explorers like us, there is little that can compare to the sighting of activity on another solar system body," said...

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- The international Cassini spacecraft has found visual evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus is geologically active. Recent images taken by the spacecraft show streams of fine, icy particles rising from the moon's south pole, suggesting they originated from warm zones in the region. The discovery puts Enceladus in the class of geologically active moons with Jupiter's Io and Neptune's Triton. It's unclear what causes the geologic activity, but scientists think it's due to internal heating caused by radioactivity or tides. Cassini passed through the plume stretching up to 300 miles above Enceladus' surface in July. During...

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New study shows methane on Saturn's moon Titan not biological NASA scientists are about to publish conclusive studies showing abundant methane of a non-biologic nature is found on Saturn's giant moon Titan, a finding that validates a new book's contention that oil is not a fossil fuel. "We have determined that Titan's methane is not of biologic origin," reports Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center, a principal NASA investigator responsible for the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer aboard the Cassini-Huygens probe that landed on Titan Jan. 14. Niemann concludes the methane "must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan,...

PARIS - Saturn's planet-size moon Titan has dramatic weather, with freezing temperatures, carbon- and nitrogen-rich clouds and possibly lightning, scientists said Wednesday, describing a world that may have looked like Earth before life developed. The European Space Agency's probe landed on Titan in January, uncovering some mysteries of the methane-rich globe - the only moon in the solar system known to have a thick atmosphere. Scientists presented detailed results of months of study in the journal Nature and at a news conference in Paris. Titan has long intrigued researchers because it is surrounded by a thick blanket of nitrogen and...

The company is bleeding billions, but management is beginning to see the light. There are a few bold steps -- including the scrapping of one of its brands -- GM execs should take to keep the auto giant running. According to some analysts on Wall Street, General Motors lost credibility last week when the company said that it would be restating 2001 earnings. That’s what it took for GM’s management to lose credibility? How about years of mismanaging its production effort? Or refusing to aggressively streamline its product offerings, recklessly pursuing incentive strategies, failing to address ballooning health-care and pension...

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