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Titan

space navigation

How to Find Your Way Home by the Light of a Pulsar

How do you navigate when you're floating out in deep space? By pulsar, that's how. In outer space (and even in Earth orbit) GPS doesn't do you a whole lot of good, so space scientists at the PLANS navigation conference in Monterey, CA this week have put together a couple of papers designed to show that a spacecraft could navigate autonomously by triangulating off the X-ray light emitted from pulsars scattered throughout the universe. The new system promises to be for space what GPS is for Earth; pretty useful when your stranded out past Saturn wondering "maybe that should have been a right at Titan..." More »

chart

Satellite Smackdown -- Which Moon is the Solar System's Awesomest?

A little while back, io9er Ed said Titan was "The Awesomest Moon in the Solar System." Well where I come from, them's fightin' words. What about Earth's Moon? Mars' Phobos? Europa?? There are boatloads of kickass moons in the solar system. We break down ten contenders in a highly scientific chart to settle this debate, once and for all. More »

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Why Titan is the Awesomest Moon in the Solar System

It's bigger than Mercury, has dune seas like Tatooine (or Arrakis) and has the coolest name of any moon: Titan. The Cassini spacecraft is still revealing many of its secrets, with another flyby scheduled just a few weeks from now. Here are five reasons to get excited about Saturn's largest satellite. More »

space porn

A Vector Map of the Unnamed Methane Sea on Titan

Peter Minton is a California teacher who loves to make vector maps in his spare time. His favorite places to map are islands and coastlines, and so when the Cassini-Huygens probe sent back images from Saturn's moon Titan he was happy to discover the geographical features he loves most. There, on the pole of Titan, was a sea full of islands. An unnamed methane sea, but still mappable using vectoring software. This is the map he created, with longitude and latitude lines. More »

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NASA's Probe Will Buzz Titan Landing Site

NASA may have failed to prove there's an underground ocean on Saturn's moon Enceladus, but now scientists claim they've found outstanding new evidence that there may be a vast ocean under the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. In this newly released image, Titan peeks out from behind Saturn while another moon, Tethys, streaks past the planet's shadowy rings. Click through for a gorgeous Titan gallery. More »

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Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings

Haze-covered Titan, a moon of Saturn with a dense, cloudy atmosphere, was mapped extensively by the recent Cassini-Huygens space probe. The probe sent back beautiful space vistas like this one, whereTitan is the glowing globe behind Saturn's rings, and tiny moon Epimetheus is the small body you see floating above it. The space probe also gave up-close view of the surface of this moon, perhaps most famous for being the place where the aliens of 2001 have left a second monolith. What you may not have known is that the surface of Titan is ridged with sand dunes. Want to see them? More »