Articles

The Downlink

Catch up on the week’s space news and consider planetary atmospheres from a few thought-provoking perspectives.

Jason Davis

Sporting 8 rotors and a nuclear power source like the Mars Curiosity rover, Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in 2034.

Ian Regan

Ian Regan, producer of the Titan segment of In Saturn's Rings, describes the meticulous process of creating the stunning visuals of this shrouded moon.

Van Kane

Both would do compelling science in the mid-2030s. Otherwise the two missions could not be more different.

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily's first report from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is on the solar system's most atmospheriffic satellite, Saturn's moon Titan.

Casey Dreier

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is not just for big payloads, it can also throw light things into space very fast. And that has significant implications for the exploration of distant destinations in our outer solar system—particularly the ocean moons of the giant planets.

Emily Lakdawalla

Google Maps released several new map products that allow you to see the locations of named features on many solar system planets and non-planets, spinning them around in space with your mouse.

Heather Hunter

Heather Hunter brings us the next installment in her series on radio detection and ranging.

Heather Hunter

Heather Hunter explains how radar works and what it's used for on Earth and beyond.

Van Kane

For the third time in less than a decade, scientists have proposed a multiple-flyby mission to explore the habitability of Saturn’s ocean moons Titan and Enceladus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Titan's north polar lakes are well-lit by summer sun in these recent Cassini images. Image processing enthusiast Ian Regan shares his recipe for processing the longer-wavelength Titan images into visually pleasing

Anna Scott

Why do we need to slice up atmospheres into classifications like the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere?

Anna Scott

There are two types of atmospheric waves that are critically important on Earth and other planets: gravity waves and planetary waves.

Brittney Cooper

Huygens may have landed on Titan over a decade ago, but a group of researchers from York University were able to make a new and unexpected discovery with this older dataset.

Sarah Hörst

What types of aerosols do we find in the atmospheres around the Solar System, and why does what we call them—clouds vs. haze vs. dust—matter? Sarah Hörst explains.

Emily Lakdawalla

Image processing enthusiast Ian Regan produced a pretty view of Titan's lake-filled north pole, now visible to Cassini's cameras in the summer sun.

Emily Lakdawalla

Tomorrow, Cassini will fly by Titan, picking up a gravity assist that will tilt its orbit slightly up and out of the ring plane. That will end what has been a wonderful year of frequent encounters with Saturnian moons.

Emily Lakdawalla

I don't think anyone was prepared for the beauty -- or the instant scientific discoveries -- in this

Emily Lakdawalla

I checked out the latest public image release from Cassini and found an awesome panorama across Saturn's rings, as well as some pretty views looking over Titan's north pole.

Emily Lakdawalla

Now that Cassini has returned to Saturn's equatorial plane, it has lots of opportunities to observe Saturn's moons. For about a week, Cassini has been taking regular sets of images of Iapetus, which I've assembled into an animation.