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Artist Andy Gracie is attempting to breed a strain of fruit fly that could survive on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The first stage of his work, The Quest for Drosophila Titanus, is part of an exhibition currently touring the UK. More »
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The Cassini mission to Saturn has been bountiful with the gorgeous pictures in the past — including one gorgeous shot that wound up in the last Star Trek movie. But these newly released images of Titan might be the most arresting Cassini pictures yet. More »
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We've officially found over 700 exoplanets, and with so many worlds to explore the big question is which, if any, could support life. But should we be looking for Earth-like planets — or is life hiding on far more alien worlds? More »
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It would sometimes seem as though there are two solar systems: One including planets, and another including moons. Until recently, most books about the solar system focused on the planets, stopping only to acknowledge the existence of their satellites with a kind of half-embarrassed nod. They would be discussed as a kind of afterthought. More »
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Since 2004, NASA's Cassini orbiter has been collecting data on Saturn, its rings and its moons, capturing breathtaking images of them all as it courses through space. More »
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It's pretty hard not to notice the gigantic looming arrow in this picture of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The striking, chevron-shaped formation is roughly the size of Texas. And while it may look like an enormous HUMANS, LOOK HERE sign, recently published research by NASA scientists suggests that it's actually a gigantic storm making its way across the moon's equatorial region. More »
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We know that Saturn's moon Titan is home to everything from ice volcanoes to methane lakes to possibly even very simple forms of life. But its biggest secret is still hidden from sight: a giant subterranean ocean, possibly of water. More »
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Titan's thick atmosphere, sand dunes, and methane lakes make it a world whose geography could be very Earthlike - albeit cold and poisonous. And now astronomers believe this moon of Saturn has seasonal rainstorms and flooding, too. Here's the evidence. More »
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Saturn's rings are one of the solar system's most brilliant sights, extending for tens of thousands of kilometers and weighing at least thirty quadrillion tons. But in this amazing photograph, you can see just how thin the rings really are. More »
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Saturn's moon Titan could hold life's building blocks in its hazy atmosphere. New simulations reveal amino acids and nucleotides could be forming there - and that perhaps we should look to the atmosphere for the source of life on Earth. More »
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The mountains on Saturn's moon Titan defy easy explanation, but readings from the Cassini probe offer a fascinating new possibility: Titan is slowly releasing heat and shriveling up, causing mountains to form on its surface like wrinkles on a raisin. More »
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Evidence of life on Saturn's moon Titan just keeps piling up, and now we can add experimental proof to the list. Recreating the satellite's nitrogen-rich atmosphere and bombarding it with UV rays produces the organic molecules that lead to life. More »
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If life exists on Saturn's hydrogen- and methane-rich moon Titan, there will be two sure signs: hydrogen depletion near the lunar surface, and less acetylene than we'd expect. The Cassini probe has found both. So...could there be life on Titan? More »
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Scientists are planning a cruise that could be described as "out of this world," despite being more business than pleasure. The secret? It'll take place on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. More »
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Saturn's atmosphere-shrouded moon Titan is dotted with methane lakes, giving it a geography like Saskatchewan or the Great Lakes region in the US. But why are all the lakes grouped in the northern hemisphere of the moon? More »
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It's been reported that a planned mission to Titan will use a robotic boat to explore the liquid-methane seas. But the project will also have eyes in the sky: a hot-air balloon will circumnavigate Titan and observe its multiform topography. More »
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A robot ship could soon be sailing across the massive bodies of liquid that dot the arctic region of Titan, Saturn's moon. Titan has huge lakes, but they're made up of ethane, methane and propane. More »
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These images of clouds high in Titan's atmosphere, published today in Nature, are strong evidence for rainstorms of methane on the moon, creating roaring rivers across Titan's surface. More »
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Saturn's Moon Titan is full of dark, icy sands, so it makes sense that its dune-filled plains should be named after a planet from the Dune series.The Chusuk plain is the dark region next to the letter C. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5331039&view=rss&microfeed=true Over at New Scientist, there's an intriguing article about how x-rays from the sun could be stirring up the molecular soup on Saturn's moon Titan - and ultimately create DNA. Recently researchers simulated Titan's atmosphere in the lab to see what it would take for the moon - whose atmosphere makes it similar to Earth in some ways - could ever cook up life as we know it. More »
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After the Cassini spacecraft flew by Saturn's moon Titan, scientists were left with some puzzling evidence. Flows on the moon's surface appeared to be eruptions of frozen oxygen, methane, and ammonia. Just as volcanoes on Earth spew liquid magma that cools into rock, Titan may be spewing gases that harden into ice. More »
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We long ago declared Saturn's moon Titan the one of the awesomest moons in the solar system (though this assertion was controversial). Granted, it’s freezing cold, but its Earth-like features have set astrobiologists dreaming and made it one of the most popular extraplanetary settings in science fiction. And a new discovery about this infamous lunar body further suggests that Titan has the capacity to produce life. More »
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Here you can see the most recent satellite photo of Ontariou Lacus, or Lake Ontario, located next to a lovely beach on Titan. It's the first image that confirms without a doubt that Saturn's moon Titan contains lakes filled with liquid. Due to the angle of the camera, the image is wedge-shaped, but you can still quite clearly see that the right edge of the lake is a beach, lapped by gentle waves of methane. See below for more methane action. More »
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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 »
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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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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 »
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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 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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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 »
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