Cassini probe at Saturn... (warning -- large images!)

Springtime on Titan

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/cassini/20100921/pia13400-640.jpg

Saturn's rings are basically a giant vinyl LP that acts like a galaxy

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ciclops_ir_2010/6549_15847_1.jpg

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ciclops_ir_2010/6480_15489_1.jpg

Enceladus Fissures Keep Getting Warmer and More Complex

As Cassini scientists await the data from today’s flyby of Enceladus, images and data from August of this year have provided more insight into the active fissures on the icy moon’s south polar region. These geyser-spewing fractures are warmer and more complicated than previously thought.

“The exquisite resolution obtained on one segment of the Damascus fracture — one of the most active regions within the south polar terrain — has revealed a surface temperature reaching a staggering 190 Kelvin, or 120 degrees below zero Fahrenheit,” said Cassini imaging team lead Carolyn Porco, in an email announcing the new images. “Far from the fractures, the temperature of the south polar terrain dips as low as 52 Kelvin, or 365 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.”

Porco said that what this means is that a phenomenal amount of heat is emerging from the fractures which are “undoubtedly the result of the tidal flexing of Enceladus brought about by its orbital resonance with Dione. However, details of this heating process are still unclear and are being studied at this very moment.”

By way of comparison, Antarctica at it's coldest is about -120F. However, these kinds of surface temperatures at the distance of Saturn is pretty special.

No CGI used in this fly-by video of Saturn - it's made up entirely of images

this is The Thread That Keeps On Giving. Great work again, ET.

wow!!

There's a nice interview with the guy who did it here.
http://www.outsideinthemovie.com/filmmaker/

Also additional vid on how he did some of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4ghSOjlc6Y

Holy fuck, that's just beautiful.

Cassiniqatsi

(sorry about the name... couldn't help myself. anyway, go watch it!)

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-190

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft's direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon.

Data from Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and predominantly low in salt far away from the moon. But closer to the moon's surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an "ocean-like" composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt water. The findings appear in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

"There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus's icy surface," said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and the lead author on the paper. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

I love me that probe.

are they investigating the whole enceladus?

This recent picture of Enceladus is knocking me out.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6193/6209087320_89518e324f_z.jpg

The geyser jets are backlit by the sun and Enceladus here is lit by Saturn-shine.

wow

Crazy great.

cool. but is that, like, a shit load of trucks coming towards us over the horizon?

Read the end of Elvis T's comment again...

Too late, I can only think of Sam Rockwell mining Enceladus...

cool. but is that, like, a shit load of trucks coming towards us over the horizon?

― Summer Slam! (Ste), Wednesday, 5 October 2011 09:24 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm looks like burning man

Dione has a very very thin oxygen atmosphere

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/moons/images/PIA07691-br500.jpg

Time to migrate.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/wp-content/gallery/titan-seasons/titan-saturn-moon-north-pole-space-planetary-science.jpg

Saturn’s Largest Moon Seen in Unprecedented Detail

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/iapetus-landslides-580x288.jpg

Subject line says it all: Massive Ice Avalanches on Iapetus

What things might sound like on Titan (the waterfall and splashdown sounds are great!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNm6ExSSitU

the people i work with are v upset because this thing got selected by a science panel instead of an x-ray telescope, but tbh i think it looks awesome

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=107

some more links

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17773383
andyxl.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/x-ray-astronomy-crunch/
andyxl.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/turbulence-in-the-gravy-waves/

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/3359901087_4c82b07365_o-580x580.jpg

That's no moon, that's a Kuiper Belt Object

Saturn’s curious moon Phoebe features a heavily-cratered shape and orbits the ringed planet backwards at a considerable distance of over 8 million miles (12.8 million km). According to recent news from the Cassini mission Phoebe may actually be a Kuiper Belt object, having more in common with planets than it does with any of Saturn’s other satellites.

132 miles (212 km) in diameter, Phoebe is the largest of Saturn’s irregular moons — a cloud of small, rocky worlds held in distant orbits at highly inclined paths. Its backwards (retrograde) motion around Saturn and dense composition are dead giveaways that it didn’t form in situ within the Saturnian system, but rather was captured at some point when it strayed too close to the gas giant.

In fact it’s now thought that Phoebe may be a remnant from the formation of the Solar System — a planetesimal — with its own unique history predating its adoption into Saturn’s extended family of moons.

juice confirmed: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/may/02/juice-picked-for-launch. launch in 2022, reaches jupiters moons in 2030, so perhaps a bit early to change the thread title, but it's going to be rad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srLlka2C7FM

Looking at landslides on Iapetus: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/20121001-iapetus-sturzstroms.html

Saturn's North Polar Vortex

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/6-saturn/2012/20121127_N00198348_filtered_f840.jpg

The vortex itself is just a small feature at the center of the northern hexagon

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/6-saturn/2012/20121127_W00077190_f840.jpg

Close-up picture is about 3km per pixel - picture-width is about as big as the Moon.

Guh at all that. The hexagon! If only Clarke had learned about THAT.

holy fuck, that's amazing

Not a Cassini image, just cool space stuff: ‘Overmassive’ black hole holds the mass of 17 billion suns: http://theconversation.edu.au/overmassive-black-hole-holds-the-mass-of-17-billion-suns-11066

https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/18142/area14mp/rqhkdpgd-1354155621.jpg

O_O at the hexagon

I'm totally starting a Hawkwind-esque space rock band called SATURN'S HEXAGON

Hawksagon

the hexagon does not care, it does not love

It's thought to be linked to these radio emmisions.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html

Hexagon in color

http://ut-images.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SaturnHex-RGB-11-28-12-JMajor-580x546.jpg

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/12/Iapetus.jpg

More Iapetus theories

Iapetus, one of Saturn’s weirdest moons, has an enormous equatorial mountain ridge, a spiky belt that rises 12 miles above the moon’s surface. How Iapetus built that belt – the only one of its kind ever observed – has been a persistent conundrum.

Now, scientists suggest that a giant impact early in Iapetus’ history knocked the moon around, dramatically slowing its rotation rate and deforming its crust. After 1 million years, Iapetus began to resemble the walnut-shaped satellite it is today: flatter at the poles, and with a ridge extending most of the way around its middle, suggested planetary scientist Gabriel Tobie of France’s University of Nantes here at the American Geophysical Union conference Dec. 4.

Earlier ideas describing the birth of the Iapetian belt invoke tectonic activity within the moon itself, or the brief presence of a impact-produced satellite – a smaller body that wandered too close to Iapetus and was shredded, briefly forming a ring that disintegrated over the moon’s equator.

Tobie and his colleagues simulated the Iapetian early years and came up with a different story. Shortly after it formed, Iapetus spun around itself once every six hours or so. But after about 10 million years of unperturbed rotation, an object between 500 and 650 miles wide zoomed in and face-planted on the moon.

The collision disrupted the moon’s rotation rate, immediately slowing it to more than 30 hours per pirouette. Such rapid braking stretched and deformed the moon’s crust, flattening its poles and pinching the ridge around its middle, Tobie demonstrated in a 3-D simulation. “It is possible for a single impact to change the rotation of Iapetus,” he said, noting a 500-mile-wide crater that could be a scar left over from the collision. “We can generate a ridge only if the body rotates very, very fast initially.”

While the theory is intriguing, some scientists at the presentation were skeptical, suggesting that it might not be as easy to despin the moon as suggested, and that the simulation may not have gotten Iapetus’ interior quite right. Another persistent mystery is the fact that the ridge isn’t wrapped all the way around the moon.

Like the rest of the theories, this newest idea can’t answer those questions, yet.

We got space rivers

http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2012/11/titan_s_nile_river/12132842-1-eng-GB/Titan_s_Nile_River_small.jpg

Not sure where else to put this, but here's a 25-minute tour of the international space station hosted by astronaut Sunita Williams.

http://kottke.org/13/01/a-tour-of-the-international-space-station

NASA Probe Observes Meteors Colliding with Saturn's Rings

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/cassini/20130425/pia14938-640.jpg

Dear god I love this kind of stuff.