All posts tagged: moons

Titan’s strange plains may be explained by unusual weather

Titan’s strange plains may be explained by unusual weather

Published by skeptic

An image of Titan taken by the Cassini spacecraft during a flyby NASA/JPL/SSI/Val Klavans Titan’s plains may be covered in up to a metre of fluffy, organic “snow”. About 65 per cent of the surface of Saturn’s huge moon is made up of strangely uniform and flat plains, and they seem to be coated in a porous, dry layer of particles that have fallen from the sky. The surface of Titan is difficult to study from afar because it is obscured by a thick, hazy atmosphere. The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, managed to take a closer look using radar. Now, Alexander Hayes at Cornell University in New York state and his colleagues have analysed the radar data in more detail than ever before. The way the radio waves from Cassini’s radar instrument bounced off Titan’s surface indicate that the surface isn’t as simple as those of most other rocky bodies in the solar system. “The canonical models that we use to try to understand Titan’s surface, which were developed for …

Bremont Is Sending a Watch to the Moon’s Surface

Bremont Is Sending a Watch to the Moon’s Surface

Published by skeptic

A multifaceted decahedral black ceramic bezel and sandwich-style three-piece case—a reworking of Bremont’s signature Trip-Tick construction—house a chronometer-rated automatic chronograph movement made by Sellita, with a 62-hour power reserve. The watch will be a passenger aboard the FLIP rover, due to launch as part of Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1), expected to land at the lunar south pole at some point in the second half of this year. It’s a one-way mission: The rover will remain permanently on the lunar surface, with the watch ticking away as it roams the landscape. FLIP’s objectives include reaching elevated positions on the lunar terrain, gathering data on lunar dust accumulation, testing dust-mitigation coatings, and surviving a two-week lunar night in hibernation (which would be a first for a US rover). In terms of serious timekeeping data for Bremont, the mission is frankly symbolic. The watch will be positioned vertically in a specially designed housing within the FLIP’s chassis, between its front wheels. Only the watch head, weighing 107 grams, is included, glued in place using a specialist composite, …

NASA–ESA partnership: Artemis II paves way for exploring Moon’s far side and south pole – Spotlight

NASA–ESA partnership: Artemis II paves way for exploring Moon’s far side and south pole – Spotlight

Published by Sam Flores

François Picard speaks to Didier Schmitt, head of future preparation for the European Space Agency. He says the Artemis II mission marks a key moment in contemporary space exploration. It is highly technical and collaborative – a test of systems, international partnerships, and our ability to extend human presence beyond Earth once again. He says the flyby will help validate critical technologies, from life support to propulsion, while also highlighting the growing role of Europe through the European Service Module. At the same time, he stresses the scientific importance of exploring the far side of the Moon and, in the near future, its south pole, where untouched materials may reveal the Moon’s, and by extension, the Earth’s evolutionary history. Ultimately, this mission is seen as a necessary step in a longer journey: mastering lunar exploration before venturing further into deep space, including Mars. What we are witnessing is not a return to past achievements, but laying the foundation of a new era of exploration. Produced by François Picard, Théophile Vareille, Juliette Laffont and Guillaume Gougeon …

Artemis II astronauts will study the Moon’s surface using mainly their eyes

Artemis II astronauts will study the Moon’s surface using mainly their eyes

Published by Sam Flores

More than 50 years after humans first flew around the Moon, Artemis astronauts will repeat the feat on Monday and use the most basic instrument to study it: their eyes. Despite the technological advancements since the Apollo missions, NASA still relies on the eyesight of its astronauts to learn more about the Moon. “The human eye is basically the best camera that could ever or will ever exist,” Kelsey Young, the lead scientist for the Artemis 2 mission, told AFP. “The number of receptors in the human eye far outweighs what a camera is able to do.” Although modern cameras may be superior to human eyesight in some respects, “the human eye is really good at color, and it’s really good at context, and it’s also really good at photometric observations,” Young said. Humans can understand how lighting changes surface details, like how angled lighting reveals texture but reduces visible color. In just the blink of an eye, humans can detect a subtle color shift and understand how lighting changes the contours of a landscape …

Saturn’s rings may have formed after a huge collision with Titan

Saturn’s rings may have formed after a huge collision with Titan

Published by skeptic

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, with the giant planet behind it in a view from the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy The story of Saturn, its rings and moons, may have started with its largest moon, Titan. A collision between an early proto-Titan and a smaller object about 400 million years ago could have set into motion the series of events that formed Saturn’s iconic rings and altered both the planet’s wobble and the orbits of its moons. The Saturn system is awash in mysteries. Its rings seem to be younger than expected, the planet’s wobble isn’t tied to the motion of Neptune as simulations have suggested it ought to be, and its small moon Iapetus has a strangely tilted orbit. Titan itself has strangely few craters and an oval, or eccentric, orbit. A huge collision that created the Titan we see today could explain all of these elements. “This is sort of a grand unified theory that covers all of the major problems,” says Matija Ćuk at the SETI Institute in California, who led the …

Saturn’s rings and moon Titan formed through ancient moon collisions

Saturn’s rings and moon Titan formed through ancient moon collisions

Published by Jenni Sidey

At a glance, Saturn’s rings appear calm and pristine when observed from afar. These rings are quite narrow and consist mainly of water ice particles that uniformly circle Saturn in a symmetric configuration. However, a recent study indicates that the current state of Saturn’s rings results from repeated cataclysmic events that have occurred over time. According to Matija Ćuk and his colleagues at the SETI Institute, the origin of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, may also provide insight into Saturn’s rings. This connection is made by combining evidence from two different contexts, both of which are due to the collision of moons. To illustrate, Titan is thought to have formed from coalescing several smaller moons, while the gravitational chaos created from Titan’s migration from Saturn may have resulted in the formation of Saturn’s rings due to subsequent moon collisions. For some time, researchers have struggled to provide satisfactory explanations for several unresolved questions involving the bizarre characteristics of Titan (i.e., the unusual orbit), the oddities of Hyperion, and the remarkably recent age of Saturn’s rings. Simulations …

New global map finds recent tectonic activity across the Moon’s surface

New global map finds recent tectonic activity across the Moon’s surface

Published by Jenni Sidey

Low, winding ridges run across the Moon’s dark plains like faint seams in cooled wax. They are easy to miss in a wide photo. Up close, they look like the surface has been gently pushed from below. A new study argues those ridges are not just old scars. Many are surprisingly young, and they show up across much more of the Moon than scientists had pinned down before. The work reports that these features are widespread across the lunar maria, the broad, dark basalt plains, and that they formed recently in lunar terms. The same stresses that build these ridges can also trigger moonquakes, the authors say, which puts them on the list of hazards future missions may need to consider. A global map of SMRs overlaid onto the LROC WAC global mosaic (∼100 m pixel–1; M. S. Robinson et al. 2010) including new SMRs identified in this work as well as SMRs identified in previous investigations. (CREDIT: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University) A shrinking Moon leaves a different kind of fingerprint The Moon and Earth both …

Synchronised volcanic eruptions on Io hint at a spongy interior

Synchronised volcanic eruptions on Io hint at a spongy interior

Published by skeptic

A volcanic eruption on Io photographed by the Galileo spacecraft NASA/JPL/DLR Five volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io erupted all at once in a cataclysm of lava. This means that they are probably all connected to the same underground magma network, which will help solve the mystery of Io’s insides. At the end of 2024, researchers monitoring Io via NASA’s Juno spacecraft saw an unusually enormous lava flow near its south pole. “There was this one gigantic eruption and lava flow, and that’s what first caught our eye, but on second look, all these other hotspots lit up as well,” says Jani Radebaugh at Brigham Young University in Utah. “There’s so much magma that we can’t quite wrap our minds around it.” The erupted lava spanned an area of about 65,000 square kilometres and released more energy than any eruption previously spotted on Io. “Picture standing at the edge of one of these features, and the valley that has been cold suddenly fills up with an entire lake of lava. As it fills up, you turn …

2026 Mars mission will set out to solve the mystery of its moons

2026 Mars mission will set out to solve the mystery of its moons

Published by skeptic

The MMX probe will visit Mars’s moons JAXA The mystery of how Mars acquired its moons, Phobos and Deimos, may start to be unravelled in 2026 with the launch of a spacecraft that will eventually bring a chunk of Phobos back to Earth. “We are sure about the origin of the Earth’s moon, but we don’t know how Phobos and Deimos got there,” says Emelia Branagan-Harris at the Natural History Museum in London. “Understanding the origins of Phobos and Deimos, and how they came to be orbiting Mars, can hopefully tell us a bit about the evolution of Mars in general and its history.” There are two competing hypotheses for how these moons came to orbit Mars: the Red Planet could have captured them as a pair of asteroids, which were either conjoined and later separated or closely orbited each other, or they could have been produced from an asteroid smashing into Mars itself, like how Earth’s moon formed. So far, we have limited evidence for either scenario, but the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Martian …

More than 100 moons were discovered in our own solar system in 2025

More than 100 moons were discovered in our own solar system in 2025

Published by skeptic

Uranus’s new moon, S/2025 U1, was spotted using the James Webb Space Telescope NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/M. El Moutamid (SwRI)/M. Hedman (University of Idaho) This year, astronomers discovered more than 100 previously unknown moons in our own solar system. There may be many more yet to be discovered, and cataloguing them could help us better understand how planets form. In March, Edward Ashton at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and his colleagues discovered 128 moons around Saturn, bringing the planet’s total to 274. The team gathered hours’ worth of images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and stacked them on top of each other to spot objects that are otherwise too dim to see. Ashton’s team now has the right to name the new moons, although Saturn’s moons are so numerous that many are no longer given informal names. In August, a small and dim new moon was found in orbit around Uranus, bringing the planet’s total to 29. Maryame El Moutamid at Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and her colleagues made the discovery using 10 long-exposure infrared images taken …