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Groovy Hills Rising From Titan Surface
Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 26, 2010 Hills with a wrinkly radial pattern stand out in a new radar image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 28, 2009. The grooved mounds in the picture, which are located in a northern hemisphere region known as Belet, are about 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide and about 60 meters (200 feet) high. The shapes of these landscape features have not been seen on Titan before, though they bear similarity to spidery features known as coronae on Venus. A corona is a circular to elliptical feature thought to result from the flow of heat in a planet's interior. Like forensic scientists, radar team members are trying to sleuth out what created these lines and hills on Titan. "This star-shaped pattern of the hills indicates something significant happening in the middle of the star," said Steve Wall of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a Cassini scientist on the radar team. "It might be caused by tectonic forces, such as the forces that pull the crust of a planet apart, or rainfall that leads to erosion, or an ice intrusion like a dike." All of these forces produce grooves on Earth's surface, but Wall says the radar team is not yet sure what is happening on Titan.
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ESA And NASA Celebrate The Fifth Anniversary Of Titan LandingParis, France (ESA) Jan 15, 2010 Five years ago the European Space Agency's (ESA) Huygens Probe made history when it landed on Titan, the largest moon in the Saturnian system. The touchdown on the surface of Titan marked the first, and so far only, landing of a man-made probe in the outer Solar System. Today many of the scientists and engineers that worked on the mission will celebrate this anniversary in the science muse ... read more |
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