Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is a strange, alien world. Covered in rivers and lakes of liquid methane, icy boulders and dunes of soot-like “sand,” its topography has long fascinated scientists […]
Saturn
The Top 10 Huygens Discoveries At Titan
On 14 January 2005, at 13:34 CET (12:34 UTC), ESA’s Huygens probe entered the history books by descending to the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
Enceladus’s Limit Cycle
Enceladus exhibits some remarkable phenomena, including water geysers spraying through surface cracks, a global ice shell that is librating atop an ocean, a large luminosity, and rapid outward orbital migration.
Understanding the Formation of Saturn’s Regular Moons in the Context of Giant Planet Moons Formation Scenarios
This article explores the different formation scenarios of the Kronian moons system in the context of a highly dissipative Saturn, with the objective of identifying the most likely of these […]
Peculiar Rainbows in Saturn’s E Ring: Uncovering Luminious Bands Near Enceladus
We report observations of stripe-like features in Enceladus’ plumes captured simultaneously by Cassini’s VIMS-IR and ISS NAC instruments during flyby E17, with similar patterns seen in VIMS-IR data from flyby […]
Enceladus’s Tidal Heating
Saturn raises a time-dependent tide on its small moon Enceladus, due to the eccentricity of the orbit. As shown in a companion paper (Goldreich et al.), the resulting tidal heating […]
Tidal Energy Measurements Help Understand Titan’s Composition And Orbital History
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists are studying Saturn’s moon Titan to assess its tidal dissipation rate, the energy lost as it orbits the ringed planet with its massive gravitational force. […]
Titan’s Fluvial and Lacustrine Landscapes
In this chapter we begin with a review of Titan’s fluvial and lacustrine landscapes as observed with Cassini remote sensing data, and what the many discoveries have revealed about Titan’s […]
The Current Cratering Rate on the Regular Satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus
We aim to compute the impact rates for objects with a diameter of 1 km onto the regular satellites of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus using our latest dynamical simulations of […]
How Titan Maintains Its Atmosphere
Southwest Research Institute partnered with the Carnegie Institution for Science to perform laboratory experiments to better understand how Saturn’s moon Titan can maintain its unique nitrogen-rich atmosphere.
