Speaking About Saturn...

There are times when I take a photograph and feel so proud of the composition, light, etc. Click on the image above, baby. Words cannot describe how proud these humans must feel about their collective and stunning achievement of capturing this image (along with countless measurements and invisible observations). Currently there is a satellite exploring Saturn and a probe that has descended onto the surface of the planet's largest moon, Titan. Cassini travelled about 800 million miles and then traversed the rings by going up through a mere 13,000 mile-wide gap, and Huygens landed on Titan to examine its thick atmosphere and icy surface. To get an idea of Saturn's size, imagine Earth as its tiny core and understand that the ring system extends as far as our Moon's orbit!

Titan is of great interest to scientists because it resembles an Earth frozen in time; it retains many properties from its early existence when the solar system first formed because it is so far removed from the heat of the Sun. Titan is larger than Mercury and has an atmosphere ten times as thick as the Earth's. Methane on Titan is in liquid form and has created river-like systems on the surface. Organic molecules including benzene have been detected, and lightning storms have lit up the sky! Truly a Miller experiment in the making. Check out the Cassini-Huygens link on the right to get an in depth analysis of what's currently going on. We should all be proud of NASA, JPL, and the EU for their work on this project.


And just to stun you, here's a picture recently taken by Cassini of a small moon, Mimas, with a backdrop of Saturn's rings: