Unidentified Titan Object Saturn's moon Titan shows an unusual bright spot that has scientists mystified. The spot, approximately the size and shape of West Virginia, is just southeast of the bright region called Xanadu and is visible to multiple instruments on the Cassini spacecraft.
posted by Diamornte
on May 25, 2005 -
32 comments
Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it
wasn't always
so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.
How things have changed. (Yours now,
$110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of
two planets and
one moon (with a
second in the works). Actually,
we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.
Maybe Not.
posted by absalom
on Jan 27, 2005 -
17 comments
Instead of liquid water,
Titan has liquid methane. Instead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere, and instead of lava, Titanian volcanoes spew very cold ice.
posted by Pretty_Generic
on Jan 21, 2005 -
28 comments
Saturn's enigmatic moon
Titan holds on to its mysteries.
Radar images reveal quite a bit of variation but no clear interpretation. The hazy atmosphere prevents the sudden shock of discovery that characterized the Voyager and Galileo flybys of the moons of Jupiter, revealing little more than
fuzzy Rorschach blobs. With less than 1% of the surface mapped, researchers suspect that Titan has a
young surface shaped by processes that have yet to be revealed.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Nov 5, 2004 -
5 comments
