Tag Archives: Cassini

Across the Universe: Friends in high places

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This entry is part 73 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in June, 2008; we first ran it here in 2016 The Mars Phoenix mission landed successfully near the north pole of Mars [in 2008]. Even though I don’t study Mars myself, I feel a special connection because the mission is being run out of my old department at the University of Arizona. I know those guys on the TV, explaining how they’ll be digging for ice in the Martian soil. Mars wasn’t the only tourist attraction that summer. The scientists of the Cassini/Huygens Saturn probes held a team meeting in Rome in June, 2008, and two dozen of them came out to visit me at Castel Gandolfo. I showed them our telescopes and libraries and meteorite collection. Friends of mine on the team arranged the visit. Why do I have so many friends in high places? It’s just the nature of my field. There are only a few thousand professional planetary astronomers in the world. We … Continue reading →

Space Camp Joy

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Children spinning their little handmade Saturn models with joy !! At Easter  I ran a small space camp for children. It was over three mornings in Louisburgh Co Mayo.The venue was Books at One, the local community bookshop.  We packed a lot of things into the three mornings, in fact, I had too much planned. Better too much than too little in my experience. Space Camp joy abounded ! Day 1 Space Camp We built paper rockets that we blew into space (in the room). I have a  box of interesting forever goodies. These are intended to be made into something at some time. In the box, I found some triangular stickers. These had rocket holograms on them !! Perfect for rocket fins, the kids agreed and they loved them. The stickers came from Recreate Ireland which encourages creativity through reuse. We checked out the news on The Planetary Society’s Light Sail 2 project. New information for  the children so … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Reflections on a Mirror

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This entry is part 61 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in March 2010, and again here in 2015. We’re swapping February and March posts this year since most of the February posts from years past were about Lent, which doesn’t start this year until March. The International Astronomical Union’s committee on planetary surfaces nomenclature (on which I serve as their resident “Latin expert” which no doubt would shock my high school Latin teachers) has voted [in 2010] to give a smooth surface feature on Saturn’s moon Titan the name “Jingpo Lacus”, after Jingpo Lake in China. From the way they reflect radar waves, regions like these on Titan’s surface appear to be very, very smooth. Our best guess is that they’re pools of liquid hydrocarbons, something like lakes of liquid natural gas. Titan’s atmosphere, about twice that of Earth’s, has methane clouds and apparently conditions that allow for this methane to rain out and pool on the surface, much like water does on … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Desert or a dessert?

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This entry is part 15 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in January, 2005, just after the Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan. We ran it again here on January, 2015. This text is based on what I submitted, which was edited for length when it was printed.   The most remarkable thing about the images from Saturn’s moon, Titan, which ESA’s Huygens probe has just sent us, is how “familiar” they look. They remind me of Nadar’s 19th century Collodion “wet plate” photographs taken from a balloon above Paris. Black and white, a bit fuzzy, these patterns of light and darkness can be grasped and processed by imagination and memory until we impose meaning on them. I picture myself floating through the clouds, gazing across at an intricate pattern of riverbeds cutting through rough light-colored mountains, flowing down to a flat, wine-dark sea. If these are riverbeds – and they certainly look like textbook examples of the many-branched “dendritic channels” made by rainfall flowing down hills … Continue reading →

Dust Storms on Titan

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Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed what appear to be giant dust storms in equatorial regions of Saturn’s moon Titan. The discovery, described in a paper published on Sept. 24 in Nature Geoscience, makes Titan the third Solar System body, in addition to Earth and Mars, where dust storms have been observed. The observation is helping scientists to better understand the fascinating and dynamic environment of Saturn’s largest moon. “Titan is a very active moon,” said Sebastien Rodriguez, an astronomer at the Université Paris Diderot, France, and the paper’s lead author. “We already know that about its geology and exotic hydrocarbon cycle. Now we can add another analogy with Earth and Mars: the active dust cycle, in which organic dust can be raised from large dune fields around Titan’s equator.” Titan is an intriguing world — in ways quite similar to Earth. In fact, it is the only moon in the Solar System with a substantial atmosphere and the … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – July 24, 2018

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This entry is part 53 of 118 in the series In the Sky This Week

Mars opposition happens this week; several people told me recently that they’ve seen Mars in the southwestern sky during the early morning hours. I find myself looking for Mars almost automatically now. Jupiter, Saturn, Venus and the Moon make sidewalk astronomy almost too easy for the next few days. A friend and I set up our telescopes on a small hill, along a busy road in Calumet Michigan. We had a couple families with children show up and they got to see them all! We got some stunned “WOWs!” – those are always nice. The half-Venus was easy to see in the ‘scopes! The Moon The Moon is a waxing gibbous, visible in the southeastern before sky before dusk, and is visible all night long. The Moon will be full on July 27th, after which it will be a waning gibbous, visible in the southeastern sky after sunset. The Moon will appear VERY near to Saturn on July 24th. The … Continue reading →

Titan Under the Haze

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These six infrared images of Saturn’s moon Titan represent some of the clearest, most seamless-looking global views of the icy moon’s surface produced so far. The views were created using 13 years of data acquired by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument on board NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The images are the result of a focused effort to smoothly combine data from the multitude of different observations VIMS made under a wide variety of lighting and viewing conditions over the course of Cassini’s mission. Previous VIMS maps of Titan (see images below) display great variation in imaging resolution and lighting conditions, resulting in obvious seams between different areas of the surface. With the seams now gone, this new collection of images is by far the best representation of how the globe of Titan might appear to the casual observer if it weren’t for the moon’s hazy atmosphere, and it likely will not be superseded for some time to come. … Continue reading →

Spectacular Cassini – Exceptional Drawings

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Space Week 2017 and Science Week 2017 merged in a flurry of drawing workshops. Hundreds of children took part in  Spectacular Cassini at Saturn. The workshop was of course inspired by the sublime images taken by the spacecraft as well as telling the story of the mission. Because I could not go to a shop and buy a Cassini spacecraft or a Huygens probe I made my own models.  Saturn and is rings was also part of my project so I made a model that could fit in my car.  It had to be light  and looked reasonably like the planet itself.  In my experience having a model of the subject in the classroom really helps to engage  children in the subject. In almost all of the workshops the children  asked to hold the spacecraft. That was fine with me but resulted in the communications dish , main engines and thrusters  falling off from time to time. A repair kit … Continue reading →

Goodbye – Cassini’s Last Splendiferous Hurrah

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        The English language is lacking in positive affirmations glowing enough to encompass the significance of the Cassini Mission to Saturn. Side winding its way into my mind in the effort to find the right words came a memory of an old TV variety show. In the show, the host announces the artists to perform by pronouncing very large words in rapid precision. Each word is preceded by a judgemental gavel blow. The hyperbolic introductions primed the audience to welcome the splendiferous offerings of the forthcoming show. The pulchritudinous (excellent) nature of the mission has produced an abundance of most noteworthy images. The collection can spectacularly stimulate our senses to levitate our minds and souls. Cassini therefore invites us to relish the beauty of Saturn and its many moons. NASA has magnanimously offered the images videos and gifs to all who wish to enjoy the resplendent wonder of this epic mission. If the same host was to … Continue reading →

A Heartfelt Farewell to NASA’s Cassini Mission to Saturn

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The Cassini mission to Saturn ranks right at the top of my list of favorite space missions; this morning, on NASA TV, I watched Cassini’s final moments as it plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn… and I had a good cry. It’s an odd juxtaposition of feelings: being overjoyed and incredibly sad at the same time. When Cassini launched in 1997, my daughters were aged 12 and 9; my wife likes to recall the story of my phoning my eldest in 2004, then in college, to tell her that Cassini was making its orbital insertion burn! She also claims that I can be “such a geek.” Yesterday, I heard a story on NPR with a NASA engineer that was at the very first Cassini planning meeting – 30 years ago! For several people, this mission has been their entire career! In an interview I heard this morning, one mission specialist said that most of what’s in recent science textbooks about … Continue reading →

New Cassini Module in NASA Eyes App

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The new Cassini Mission module is live in the NASA Eyes on the Solar System app! The module is JAM-PACKED with features, including a cinematic simulation the entire 20-year mission, images of Saturn, its rings and moons, an interactive timeline – where you can follow the spacecraft throughout its mission, and simulations of several Cassini Grand Finale events. NASA Eyes is a free app for the PC/MAC and a GREAT educational tool. With NASA Eyes, you can go to any planet in our solar system, many moons, asteroids, and comets. You can zoom to several different active space missions, and simulate what they are doing in real-time, or fast-forward or backward to any point in their mission; several missions have built-in tours – like Cassini. There’s a module about the 2017 eclipse, and the Eyes on the Earth module has several different visualizations of climate data. The Eyes on Exoplanets module lets you zoom to hundreds of different exoplanet systems, see what … Continue reading →

Cosmic Lobster Pot

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This entry is part 9 of 12 in the series Exploring the Solar System

I have always visualised Cassini’s journey through the Saturnian system as a kind of orchestrated cosmic dance. Cassini moves silently at great speed in its petal shape overlapping orbits. This precisely executed dance brings Cassini frequently through the icy ring plane north to south and then back again on the opposite side of the planet, south to north. This robot ship continues on its unparalleled odyssey of exploration. On board, Cassini is the custodian of twelve science instruments all primed to seek, gather, and process the offerings of this unique planetary system. Collectively they are performing one of the most important scientific probing of Saturn and its many moons in the history of space exploration. One of these science instruments is the Cosmic Dust Analyser. The CDA looks a bit like a golden lobster pot,that is not a bad analogy. This apparatus is trawling the interplanetary ocean for particles of cosmic dust, tiny particles that are the messengers of the … Continue reading →