Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Titan is a weird alternate-universe Earth, surprisingly similar to our own planet in some ways, but not at all like our planet in others.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini mission announced today the first observation of a specular reflection off of a lake on Titan. A specular reflection is a mirror-like flash, and you only get one when you have a mirror-like surface -- very, very smooth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini recently captured a series of images documenting Rhea passing behind Titan.

Emily Lakdawalla

As is probably obvious by now, I love playing with spacecraft image data. I am always looking for excuses to dive into space image archives to unearth images of stuff in space that haven't really been seen by very many people before.

Emily Lakdawalla

Checking in on Cassini's raw images this weekend, there are several nice shots to play with, including the many frames from which I tossed together this cute animation.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today's science press release out of the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting concerns changes in lakes near Titan's south pole observed during Cassini's mission. In brief, repeat Cassini RADAR observations of the same spots during different Titan flybys turned up places where there appeared to be dark lakes in earlier images and dry lakes in later images.

Jani Radebaugh

The Cassini spacecraft made its 59th flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, on Friday, July 24, and in the last few hours we have received images from the RADAR instrument in SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) mode.

John Smith

Each Titan flyby is not a fork in the road, but rather a Los Angeles style cloverleaf in terms of the dizzying number of possible destinations. So how did our current and future plans for the path of the Cassini spacecraft come to be? That's the question Dave Seal put to me since that's my job -- I am a tour designer.

David Seal

David Seal explains the complications for Cassini coming from Titan's atmosphere and Solar Cycle.

David Seal

David Seal muses on his time as the mission planner for Cassini, and the history behind its name, and astronomy in Rome.

Emily Lakdawalla

This time around DPS features three separate oral sessions on Titan, indicating just how much attention that moon is getting from the scientific community right now. From the first session, on Titan's lower atmosphere, I'm just covering the two talks on Titan's lakes.

Emily Lakdawalla

A press release from the Cassini VIMS team today is titled

Emily Lakdawalla

I thought that today's image release from the Cassini imaging team was exceptionally pretty.

Ted Stryk

I spent a large portion of the day at the Lunar and Planetary Institute's library and presented my own poster during the poster sessions, so my coverage of Thursday's sessions is limited.

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a press release from the Cassini mission today about a pile of papers (14 of them!) being published in the journal Icarus about Saturn's icy moons. I haven't had time to read more than the overview article yet, but I wanted to come up with a graphic for an overview of Saturn's moons, and I couldn't resist delving into the massive database of Cassini images to produce something new

Emily Lakdawalla

One of the major results from the Cassini mission last year was the production of a mosaic of images from its RADAR instrument covering Titan's north pole. Titan's north pole has lakes upon lakes, some big, some small, but everywhere you look, there they are.

Emily Lakdawalla

Lakes have been spotted near the south pole of Titan before, in this image by the ISS team, which was considered compelling but not conclusive at the time.

Doug Ellison

Emily Lakdawalla

The other day I posted a global view of Titan featuring new territory near the north pole. Now the imaging team has released a much higher resolution version of this view.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Outer Planets Assessment Group or OPAG met two weeks ago, and the presentations from the meeting were recently posted online.