Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has received a three-year, $2,999,998 million grant from NASA to identify and characterize life and its biosignatures in frozen sand dunes in Alaska, under conditions similar […]
Titan
THUNDER: A Titan Orbiter Mission Concept for the New Frontiers Program Designed at the JPL Planetary Science Summer School
Saturn’s moon Titan is an enigmatic icy world whose surface is constantly modified by its active, Earthlike precipitation system. Here, we propose the Titan’s Hydrocarbons: Uncovering New Dimensions of Evolutionary […]
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 […]
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.
Rapid Automated Mapping of Clouds on Titan With Instance Segmentation
Despite widespread adoption of deep learning models to address a variety of computer vision tasks, planetary science has yet to see extensive utilization of such tools to address its unique […]
Open Questions and Future Directions in Titan Science
In this chapter we attempt to distill the very large number of possible future inquiries of Titan into a relatively concise list of twenty high level questions – each of […]
Laboratory Studies On The Influence of Hydrogen on Titan-like Photochemistry
Laboratory investigations of photochemical reactions in simulated Titan-like atmospheric systems provide insight into the formation of gas and aerosol products and the influence of different environmental parameters on the types […]
Experimental Heating of Complex Organic Matter at Titan’s Interior Conditions Supports Contributions to Atmospheric N2 and CH4
Titan’s abundant atmospheric N2 and CH4 gases are notable characteristics of the moon that may help constrain its origins and evolution. Previous work suggests that atmospheric CH4 is lost on […]
Launch Services Contract Awarded For Dragonfly Astrobiology Mission
NASA has selected SpaceX to provide launch services for the Dragonfly mission, a rotorcraft lander mission under NASA’s New Frontiers Program, designed to explore Saturn’s moon Titan. The mission will […]
