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JPL has released a re-mix of the data and images gathered by Huygens 12 years ago in a beautiful new video. This is the last opportunity to celebrate the success of Huygens before Cassini ends its mission in September of 2017. ... After a two-and-a-half-hour descent, the metallic, saucer-shaped spacecraft came to rest with a thud on a dark floodplain covered in cobbles of water ice, in temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing. ... How much of this video is actual images and data vs computer graphics? Of course, the clips at the beginning and end of the video are...

Explanation: Delivered by Saturn-bound Cassini, ESA's Huygens probe touched down on the ringed planet's largest moon Titan, ten years ago on January 14, 2005. These panels show fisheye images made during its slow descent by parachute through Titan's dense atmosphere. Taken by the probe's descent imager/spectral radiometer instrument they range in altitude from 6 kilometers (upper left) to 0.2 kilometers (lower right) above the moon's surprisingly Earth-like surface of dark channels, floodplains, and bright ridges. But at temperatures near -290 degrees C, the liquids flowing across Titan's surface are methane and ethane, hydrocarbons rather than water. After making the most...

Like most New Yorkers, I have real estate fever. Even though I hate moving, I can't travel anywhere without wondering what it would be like to live there. I can't walk down a street in Oaxaca or the East Village without window shopping for apartments and evaluating the restaurant scene and the availability of playgrounds. It doesn't stop there. Roll a sleeping bag out under the sky in a place like Mesa Verde, 7,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies, on a summer evening and you will wake up at midnight with your nose in the Milky Way. There are...

....The evidence is mounting that not only do we have more than a century's worth of recoverable oil in the United States alone (even if there is a limit to the earth's oil supply), but that we also actually have a limitless supply of Texas tea because oil is in fact a renewable resource that is being constantly created deep under the earth's surface and which rises upward, where microscopic organisms that thrive in the intense pressure and heat miles below us interact with and alter it. In other words, we have an unending supply of oil, some of which...

How long are we going to continue referring to oil as Fossil fuel when we have known for many (Many) years that oil as we know it comes not from Dinosaurs etc but rather from "other" organic materials such as "trees" etc. Animals that die (including dinosaurs) do not leave a trace of "oil" when they die. They putrefy, dehydrate and turn to dust, leaving only their bones to be discovered later on. Yes there are fossils in the La Brea Tar Pits and many other such surface Tar Pits around the world but that is because animals fell in...

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...

 Two potential signatures of life on Saturn's moon Titan have been found by the Cassini spacecraft. But scientists are quick to point out that non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations.Titan is much too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but some scientists have suggested that exotic life-forms could live in the lakes of liquid methane or ethane that dot the moon's surface.In 2005, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field and Heather R Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, calculated that such microbes could eke out an existence by breathing in hydrogen...

Explanation: How many moons does Saturn have? So far 62 have been discovered, the smallest only a fraction of a kilometer across. Six of its largest satellites can be seen here, though, in a sharp Saturnian family portrait taken on March 9. Larger than Earth's Moon and even slightly larger than Mercury, Titan has a diameter of 5,150 kilometers and starts the line-up at the lower left. Continuing to the right across the frame are Mimas, Tethys, [Saturn], Enceladus, Dione, and Rhea at far right. Saturn's first known natural satellite, Titan was discovered in 1655 by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens,...

LONDON (Reuters) - There is a hot spot on one of Saturn's moons which should not be there and has yet to be explained, scientists said on Tuesday. It is located at the south pole of Enceladus, a moon with a diameter of just 500 km (310 miles) which orbits Saturn at a distance of around 238,000 km. The hot spot is unusual because it occurs at the pole, scientists said. Usually, the hottest part of any planet or moon is around the equator, as is the case with the earth. This suggests that the heat at Enceladus' southern pole...

THE first true colour image of Saturn reveals that the ringed planet is not the silver orb visible from Earth but a deep shade of blue. Instead, the image - released yesterday by the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado - shows that Saturn's northern hemisphere is a soft azure, striped by the shadows of the planet's rings. In this image released by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2005, a true color view from the Cassini spacecraft taken Jan. 18, 2005, shows the moon Mimas as it drifts along in its orbit against the azure backdrop of Saturn's...

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,...

This set of six images obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows trails that were dragged out from Saturn's F ring by objects about a half mile (1 kilometer) in diameter. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/QMUL Scientists working with images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have discovered strange, half-mile-sized objects punching through one of Saturn's rings and leaving glittering trails behind them. The results were presented at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria. The penetration occurred in the outermost of Saturn's main rings, called the F ring, which has a circumference of 550,000 miles (881,000 kilometers). Scientists are calling the trails "mini-jets."...

Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth 13 February 2008 Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA, are reported in the 29 January 2008 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material—it’s a giant factory of...

Pasadena CA (SPX) Mar 20, 2008 NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered evidence that points to the existence of an underground ocean of water and ammonia on Saturn's moon Titan. The findings made using radar measurements of Titan's rotation will appear in the March 21 issue of the journal Science. "With its organic dunes, lakes, channels and mountains, Titan has one of the most varied, active and Earth-like surfaces in the solar system," said Ralph Lorenz, lead author of the paper and Cassini radar scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., "Now we see changes in the...

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Mar 04, 2008Anomalous TrajectoriesScientists are puzzled by unexpected acceleration in several unmanned spacecraft as they flew toward the Sun.In a previous Thunderbolts Picture of the Day article about the so-called “Pioneer anomaly”, we noted that NASA scientists have determined that both Pioneer 10 and 11 are off course by more than a hundred thousand kilometers. Mission specialists admitted that they had no explanation for the navigational deviation so many speculations were announced to the press about what “mysterious” forces could be acting on the tiny probes.As long ago as September 1998, however, the same enigmatic forces were also...

A COMET that appeared in the night sky over Christmas has invited comparisons with the Star of Bethlehem. But it is amateur astronomers with telescopes and binoculars who are pursuing the object rather than Wise Men bearing gifts. Comet Machholz will be at its most visible tomorrow and Thursday. Even then it will be no more than a faint smudge of light difficult to see with the naked eye. A pair of binoculars pointing south should pick it out near the Pleiades star cluster. Comets have been proposed as an explanation for the star that guided the Three Wise Men...

Yesterday's post on new Cassini'S close-ups of Saturn's mysterious North Pole Hexagon were absolutely breathtaking in the view of the astounding spectacle that nature is capable of. Most of the images involving spectacles such as the Hexagon will usually be skewed to a certain color to dramatize the images to a heightened state of existence. But the images shown here today, on their merit, equally as dramatic but with a truer representation off their color persona that naturally tends to be more staid, neutral, certainly less dramatic as provided by the most recent batch of images provided below. Free Republic:November...

Scientists said Monday they have found the first widespread evidence of giant hydrocarbon lakes on the surface of Saturn's planet-size moon Titan. The cluster of hydrocarbon lakes was spotted near Titan's frigid north pole during a weekend flyby by the international Cassini spacecraft, which flew within 590 miles of the moon. Researchers counted about a dozen lakes ranging from 6 miles to 62 miles wide. Some lakes, which appeared as dark patches in radar images, were connected by channels while others had tributaries flowing into them. Several were dried up, but the ones that contained liquid were most likely a...

PARIS (AFP) - Lakes of methane have been spotted on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, boosting the theory that this strange, distant world bears beguiling similarities to Earth , according to a new study. Titan has long intrigued space scientists, as it is the only moon in the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere -- and its atmosphere, like Earth's, mainly comprises nitrogen. Titan's atmosphere is also rich in methane, although the source for this vast store of hydrocarbons is unclear. Methane, on the geological scale, has a relatively limited life. A molecule of the compound lasts several tens of...