Exploring Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, presents unique orbital challenges due to its dense atmosphere, gravitational perturbations, and limited sunlight. A new study proposes an innovative satellite constellation architecture based on […]
A poleward-thinning ice shell can drive circulation in the subsurface oceans of icy moons by imposing a meridional temperature gradient–colder at the equator than the pole–through the freezing point suppression […]
The discovery of extraterrestrial reservoirs of liquid water has motivated missions to icy moons Europa and Titan.
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the US space agency NASA have made an unexpected discovery that challenges one of the basic rules of chemistry and provides […]
Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a global ocean that is covered by an ice shell. The moon’s eccentric orbit forces the shell to librate, which distorts the shell and thereby generates […]
The Special Issue of Geosciences entitled “Worlds of the Solar System: Geological Evolution and Habitability of Planets and Moons” aims to bring together the latest advances on the dynamic processes […]
In Titan’s atmosphere, the chemistry of small hydrocarbons and nitriles represent an important link from molecular species to the ubiquitous organic haze that gives Titan its characteristic yellow color.
We present spatially resolved Keck/NIRC2 images of a stellar occultation by Titan on September 5, 2022 and compare them to predictions from concurrent ALMA observations and a suite of General […]
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has begun to spectrally characterize small exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars, but interpretation of these spectra is ambiguous, with stellar, instrumental, or atmospheric origins possible […]
In the study presented here, we model the gas phase chemistry induced by plasma discharge at low temperature (150 K) in the NASA Ames COSmIC Simulation Chamber (COSmIC) using a […]
