Tag Archives: titan

NASA Futuristic Space Exploration Concepts

Not long ago, an enormous telescope hovering beyond the moon and peering back to the dawn of the universe would have been science fiction, but the James Webb Space Telescope is out there today doing very real science. The next big advancement in space science has to start somewhere, and …

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Crystalline Nitriles

Titan, Saturn’s icy moon, is an ideal planetary body to study prebiotic chemistry, origins of life, and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment. It has a nitrogen-based atmosphere, complex organic chemistry fueled by radiation from the Sun and Saturn’s magnetosphere, hydrocarbon lakes, organic dunes on the equator, and seasonal …

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NASA’s Dragonfly Mission

NASA’s Dragonfly mission will send a rotorcraft lander to the surface of Titan in the mid-2030s. Dragonfly was officially selected for flight by NASA as the fourth New Frontiers mission on 2019 June 27. Launch is planned for 2027, with Titan arrival in the mid-2030s, during the local northern hemisphere …

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Titan’s Impact Craters

Using the spectral data collected by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, a team of researchers has found a mixture of organic materials and water ice in nine impact craters on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. This colorized radar image, taken by NASA’s Cassini …

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Cyclopropenylidene Detected

Using high sensitivity spectroscopic observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have detected a small cyclic molecule called cyclopropenylidene (C3H2) in the atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. This composite image shows an infrared view of Titan. In this image blue represents wavelengths centered at 1.3 …

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Faster Than Expected

Titan Is Moving Away From Saturn 100 Times Faster Than Expected Cassini’s mission to Saturn may have ended years ago, but scientists analyzing the data sent back by the probe continue to draw new insights about the sixth planet from the sun and its system of moons. We now know …

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Titan Migrates From Saturn

Faster than Previously Thought Saturn is orbited by 82 moons, and tidal friction within the giant planet causes the moons to migrate outwards. In a study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers used two independent measurements obtained with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to measure Titan’s orbital expansion rate. …

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Titan Has ‘Electrically-Charged’ Hydrocarbon Sands

Low-density organic granules that cover the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan are ‘electrically charged,’ according to new experiments done by scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology. An artist’s rendering of the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Image credit: Benjamin de Bivort, debivort.org / CC BY-SA 3.0. The research, …

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