Changes in Titan’s Surface Attributed to Seasonal Rainstorms !

Latest news from your favorite ringed planet.

–Ben
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March 17, 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today, members of the Cassini Imaging Team are releasing new discoveries, published earlier in the journal /Geophysical Research Letters/ and today in the journal /Science/, showing surface changes in the equatorial regions of Titan attributed to methane rainstorms. The occurrence of these rainstorms now, a year and a half after northern spring arrived at Saturn and on Titan, shows that the weather on Titan and the changes wrought on its surface are affected by the changing seasons.

These dramatic findings suggest that weather in the `tropical’ regions on Titan is similar to that seen in the Earth’s tropics, with the outbreak of storms being the Titan equivalent of the processes that create Earth’s tropical rain forest climates. They also give good reason to believe that the river channels carved in Titan’s arid desert regions, such as those sighted in the images returned by the Huygens probe during its descent near the equator in January 2005, are in fact carved by seasonal rains.

Visit …

http://ciclops.org/view_event/155/Methane_Rain_on_Titans_Deserts

… and see the evidence for yourself: Beautiful images of recent giant weather systems developing around the equator and brief video clips of moving methane clouds.

And Happy St. Paddy’s Day to all!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

MESSENGER successfully entered orbit at Mercury!

Welcome to Mercury.

Put on your Nomex jacket and stay awhile.

–Ben

MESSENGER successfully entered orbit at Mercury!

Mar. 17, 2011 | 18:16 PDT | Mar. 18 01:16 UTC

Just a brief post to announce that at 01:00 UTC MESSENGER completed a 15-minute burn of its main engines to enter orbit at Mercury! According to mission controllers, all indications from the low-rate telemetry received through the spacecraft’s low-gain antenna are that the burn proceeded perfectly, just as expected; they are now waiting for the craft to turn to Earth to relay the high-rate telemetry to confirm the details. Regardless of those details, though, MESSENGER is now in Mercury orbit, alive, and communicating with Earth!

We of Earth have now successfully orbited every classical planet — every body known to move across the heavens and visible to the naked eye.

We first orbited Earth in 1957;
the Moon in 1966;
Mars in 1971;
Venus in 1975;
Jupiter in 1995;
Saturn in 2004;
and now, finally, Mercury, in 2011.

Hooray!

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002966/

The Drama of Starbirth

nice eye candy.
–Ben

The Drama of Starbirth

A new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of the dramatic effects new-born stars have on the gas and dust from which they formed. Although the stars themselves are not visible, material they have ejected is colliding with the surrounding gas and dust clouds and creating a surreal landscape of glowing arcs, blobs and streaks.

The star-forming region NGC 6729 is part of one of the closest stellar nurseries to the Earth and hence one of the best studied. This new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of a section of this strange and fascinating region (a wide-field view is available here: eso1027). The data were selected from the ESO archive by Sergey Stepanenko as part of the Hidden Treasures competition [1]. Sergey’s picture of NGC 6729 was ranked third in the competition…

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1109/

Janna Levin: The sound the universe makes

cool.
–Ben

Janna Levin: The sound the universe makes

We think of space as a silent place. But physicist Janna Levin says the universe has a soundtrack — a sonic composition that records some of the most dramatic events in outer space. (Black holes, for instance, bang on spacetime like a drum.) An accessible and mind-expanding soundwalk through the universe.

http://www.ted.com/talks/janna_levin_the_sound_the_universe_makes.html

Discovery spacewalk seen from the ground

Way cool. Way to go Thierry Legault.
–Ben

Discovery spacewalk seen from the ground

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/03/09/discovery-spacewalk-seen-from-the-ground/

Orion’s Lesser-known Nebula Takes Centre Stage

fyi:
interesting dust details.
–Ben

Orion’s Lesser-known Nebula Takes Centre Stage

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a close-up view of an outer part of the Orion Nebula’s little brother, Messier 43. This nebula, which is sometimes referred to as De Mairan’s Nebula after its discoverer, is separated from the famous Orion Nebula (Messier 42) by only a dark lane of dust. Both nebulae are part of the massive stellar nursery called the Orion molecular cloud complex, which includes several other nebulae, such as the Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) and the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024).

The Orion molecular cloud complex is about 1400 light-years away, making it one of the closest massive star formation regions to Earth. Hubble has therefore studied this extraordinary region extensively over the past two decades, monitoring how stellar winds sculpt the clouds of gas, studying young stars and their surroundings and discovering many elusive objects, such as brown dwarf stars.

This view shows several of the brilliant hot young stars in this less-studied region and it also reveals many of the curious features around even younger stars that are still cocooned by dust.

This picture was created from images taken using the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Images through yellow (F555W, coloured blue) and near-infrared (F814W, coloured red) filters were combined. The exposure times were 1000 s per filter and the field of view is about 3.3 arcminutes across.

http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1109a/