A “mini Nile river” spotted on Saturn’s moon
By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, December 12, 2012 - 0 Comments
Scientists have spotted a “mini Nile river” on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest…
Scientists have spotted a “mini Nile river” on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, flowing over 400 km from its headwaters to a large sea. High resolution images snapped by the international Cassini mission, which is exploring Saturn and its moons, let us glimpse a river system flowing on another planet for the first time.
Titan is a fascinating place, and the only other world we know of with liquid at its surface. Its freezing cold—surface temperatures are about -178 C—but remarkably Earth-like, with a hazy atmosphere, hills, mud flats, even rivers and rain. Instead of water, though, the liquid on Titan is ethane, methane and propane; scientists think this newly photographed river, at the moon’s north pole, is filled with liquid hydrocarbons.
“Titan is the only place we’ve found besides Earth that has a liquid in continuous movement on its surface,” Steve Wall, the radar deputy team lead, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a release. “This picture gives us a snapshot of a world in motion. Rain falls, and rivers move that rain to lakes and seas, where evaporation starts the cycle all over again. On Earth, the liquid is water; on Titan, it’s methane; but on both it affects most everything that happens.”
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Filmed on location
By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 9, 2009 at 11:23 PM - 11 Comments
JJ Abrams’ Star Trek, as you have no doubt already heard, is spectacular, touching, funny, gorgeous. It is not flawless, and it’s only a superbly executed piece of pop culture after all, but I can’t imagine anyone else doing a better reboot for the series. Abrams is much more than just another skilled technician. He’s good for the movies.
It contains one sequence designed to appeal, not to Star Trek geeks, but to fans of real-life space exploration. In the third act it becomes necessary for the Enterprise to hide somewhere briefly. Scottie and Sulu pick Titan, the cloudy moon of Saturn. The sequence lasts about a minute and a half — this movie moves fast — but as a guy who used to spend hours poring over Voyager pictures from Saturn and Jupiter in Discover and National Geographic, I was happy for a chance to see Titan again. Continue…
















