Titan Saturns Moon Has Watery Ocean

In long-gone we had reported:DIA Bitter Spectators 'saw' Space invader on Saturn moon Titan : CIA Tape NASA Scientists Unrelated Life Exists on Saturn Moon Titan : Endless Disturb An artist's report of the facade symphony of Titan, Saturn's chief moonNow in latest momentum, according to NASA scientists fishy they exercise found the strongest sign yet that Saturn's giant moon, Titan, may exercise a saline marine less its hostile siesta. If confirmed, it would catapult Titan popular an exclusive class of solar system moons harbouring water, an main fragment for life. Titan boasts methane-filled seas at the poles and a attainable lake obstruct the equator. And it's hope been speculated that Titan contains a resonant reduce facade, based on statistical modelling and electric section section completed by the Huygens spacecraft that landed on the siesta in 2005. The latest evidence is tranquillity contingent, but outer scientists intended it's reasonably the best that can be obtained passing of carriage a spacecraft to restraint popular the siesta - a costly bash that won't be situated anytime openly. The research looks piquant, intended Gabriel Tobie of France's University of Nantes. "If the therapy is sufficient, this is a very strong detection," Tobie intended. The detection by an international board of researchers was released online Thursday by the life history Science. The scientists pored over data from the orbiting Cassini spacecraft, which flew by Titan part a dozen grow old concerning 2006 and last rendezvous and took gravity section for a glance of its incoming. They found Titan got squeezed and spread out depending on its control as regards Saturn, telltale the attendance of a unspoken marine. If Titan were round rock and ice, such deformations would not come about. "Titan is flattering squashy," noted Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University, who was run off of the research board. Scientists did not grope popular the quality of the marine, but endure estimates suggested it can be 30 miles to 62 miles good and take in traces of ammonia. Titan is one of the few worlds in the solar system as a consequence a applicable atmosphere, and the attendance of an underground marine can offerings determine how Titan replenishes methane in its smoggy atmosphere. Having an inside public body of water would as well publication Titan an good-looking works to deliver whether it would be benefit of original microbial life. Other moons on the shortlist: Jupiter's Europa, where an underground marine is intention to exist and spanking Saturn moon, Enceladus, where jets exercise been seen spewing from the siesta. "Any feeling that has reduce water requirements to be investigated dexterously," intended planetary scientist Jean-Luc Margot of the University of California, Los Angeles, who had no do in the research.

Reference: truth-just-ahead.blogspot.com

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Thousand Year Drought On Titan And How Our Ancient Oceans Led To Life

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:

g STARS - A new study shows how the solar storms of March 8th through 10th dumped enough energy in Earth's upper atmosphere to power every residence in New York City for two years. Studying how the Sun affects the Earth is important in understanding our planet's habitability. See article.

g ABODES - Data from NASA's Cassini mission indicates that parts of Titan may not see rain for more than 1,000 years. Understanding the cycling of liquids on Titan could help astrobiologists understand life's potential on the unique moon. See article.

g LIFE - By studying carbon-rich rocks, researchers are gaining new information about how changes in the atmosphere and oceans of the ancient Earth helped stage the emergence of animal life. See article.

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Monumental Solar System Changes Nasa Cassini Sees Saturn Storms Explosive Power It Covers 300 000 Kilometers

SEPTEMBER 04, 2013 - SATURN - A monster storm that erupted on Saturn in late 2010 - as large as any storm ever observed on the ringed planet -- has already impressed researchers with its intensity and long-lived turbulence. A new paper in the journal Icarus reveals another facet of the storm's explosive power: its ability to churn up water ice from great depths. This finding, derived from near-infrared measurements by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, is the first detection at Saturn of water ice. The water originates from deep in Saturn's atmosphere.

This set of images from NASA's Cassini mission shows the turbulent power of a monster Saturn storm. The

visible-light image in the back, obtained on Feb. 25, 2011, by Cassini's imaging camera, shows the turbulent

clouds churning across the face of Saturn. The inset infrared image, obtained a day earlier, by Cassini's visual

and infrared mapping spectrometer, shows the dredging up of water and ammonia ices from deep in Saturn's

atmosphere. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Univ. of Arizona/Univ. of Wisconsin

"The new finding from Cassini shows that Saturn can dredge up material from more than 100 miles [160 kilometers]," said Kevin Baines, a co-author of the paper who works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It demonstrates in a very real sense that typically demure-looking Saturn can be just as explosive or even more so than typically stormy Jupiter." Water ice, which originates from deep in the atmosphere of gas giants, doesn't appear to be lofted as high at Jupiter.

Monster storms rip across the northern hemisphere of Saturn once every 30 years or so, or roughly once per Saturn year. The first hint of the most recent storm first appeared in data from Cassini's radio and plasma wave subsystem on Dec. 5, 2010.

Soon after that, it could be seen in images from amateur astronomers and from Cassini's imaging science subsystem. The storm quickly grew to superstorm proportions, encircling the planet at about 30 degrees north latitude for an expanse of nearly 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers).

The new paper focuses on data gathered by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer on Feb. 24, 2011. The team, led by Lawrence Sromovsky, also of the University of Wisconsin, found that cloud particles at the top of the great storm are composed of a mix of three substances: water ice, ammonia ice, and an uncertain third constituent that is possibly ammonium hydrosulfide.

The observations are consistent with clouds of different chemical compositions existing side-by-side, though it is more likely that the individual cloud particles are composed of two or all three of the materials.

The classic model of Saturn's atmosphere portrays it as a layered sandwich of sorts, with a deck of water clouds at the bottom, ammonia hydrosulfide clouds in the middle, and ammonia clouds near the top. Those layers are just below an upper tropospheric haze of unknown composition that obscures almost everything.

But this storm appears to have disrupted those neat layers, lofting up water vapor from a lower layer that condensed and froze as it rose. The water ice crystals then appeared to become coated with more volatile materials like ammonium hydrosulfide and ammonia as the temperature decreased with their ascent, the authors said.

"We think this huge thunderstorm is driving these cloud particles upward, sort of like a volcano bringing up material from the depths and making it visible from outside the atmosphere," said Sromovsky. "The upper haze is so optically thick that it is only in the stormy regions where the haze is penetrated by powerful updrafts that you can see evidence for the ammonia ice and the water ice. Those storm particles have an infrared color signature that is very different from the haze particles in the surrounding atmosphere."

In understanding the dynamics of this Saturn storm, researchers realized that it worked like the much smaller convective storms on Earth, where air and water vapor are pushed high into the atmosphere, resulting in the towering, billowing clouds of a thunderstorm.

The towering clouds in Saturn storms of this type, however, were 10 to 20 times taller and covered a much bigger area. They are also far more violent than an Earth storm, with models predicting vertical winds of more than about 300 mph (500 kilometers per hour) for these rare giant storms.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA. The VIMS team is based at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

For more information about the Cassini mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

- NASA.

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