Read moreThe team discovered that in order to shape Titan’s dunes, the moon’s westerly winds must be about 50 percent stronger than previously predicted. Though these westerlies only prevail about two percent of the time on Titan, they are the driving forces shaping the moon’s dunes. “That’s what does all the geomorphic work,” Burr confirmed.
The findings are further proof that Titan is a world of extremes, in which brief periods of seasonally-driven unrest can have more influence than the moon’s “normal” weather during the rest of the Saturnian year. It also demonstrates how a discarded, antiquated piece of equipment can be reinvented to resolve modern questions.
Along those lines, Burr plans to use Ames wind tunnel to investigate Titan’s past. “We just had some new work funded, and we get to go back now and experiment with different paleoclimates on Titan,” she told me. “There’s the thought that Titan has gone through some very significant climatic shifts over the age of the solar system, and the atmosphere we see there now may be unusual.”
Given that the moon supports such a variety of bizarre features, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that it’s an atypical place not just by the solar system’s standards, but by its own as well. If that’s true, then we are just lucky enough to catch it during its more dynamic episodes, when rivers are flowing, winds are blowing, and sand is formed in its skies.
titan
Sunsets on Titan are teaching us about distant exoplanets
Despite the staggering distances to other planetary systems, in recent years researchers have begun to develop techniques for collecting spectra of exoplanets.
When one of these worlds transits, or passes in front of its host star as seen from Earth, some of the star’s light travels through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, where it is changed in subtle, but measurable, ways.
This process imprints information about the planet that can be collected by telescopes. The resulting spectra enable scientists to tease out details about the temperature, composition and structure of exoplanets’ atmospheres.
Robinson and his colleagues exploited a similarity between exoplanet transits and sunsets witnessed by the Cassini spacecraft at Titan. Called solar occultations, these observations allowed the scientists to observe Titan as a transiting exoplanet without having to leave the solar system.
Many worlds in our solar system, including Titan, are blanketed by clouds and high-altitude hazes. Scientists expect that many exoplanets would be similarly obscured.
Clouds and hazes create a variety of complicated effects that must be disentangled from the signature of these alien atmospheres, and present a major obstacle for understanding transit observations. Due to the complexity and computing power required to address hazes, models used to understand exoplanet spectra usually simplify their effects.
“Previously, it was unclear exactly how hazes were affecting observations of transiting exoplanets,” said Robinson. “So we turned to Titan, a hazy world in our own solar system that has been extensively studied by Cassini.”
Sunsets on Titan are teaching us about distant exoplanets
Read more "Sunsets on Titan are teaching us about distant exoplanets"
Read moreFuel is running low on Cassini, but there’s enough for another four years of maneuvering. Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have mastered the art of using Titan’s gravity to steer Cassini into new, interesting orbits. NASA hopes to send the spacecraft diving inside the majestic rings of Saturn to study their composition. The extended mission would cost about $60 million a year. But that money has not materialized in the NASA budget. If there is no funding, NASA will have to end the Cassini mission next year. For robotic spacecraft, the greatest hazard in the solar system turns out to be the NASA budget.
Super Ball Bot.
Or… Bucky Fuller’s robot mind child explores Titan.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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Read moreDue to global warming, the glacial lake is also rapidly changing, ideal circumstances for a robot being taught to recognize shifts in a fluid environment.
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The prototype robot has spent the last two years exploring its surroundings, determining the lake’s size and depth, measuring its pH, and observing all meteorological phenomena.
It’s not ready yet: The lander’s instruments are designed for a terrestrial environment, and the current version is far too heavy to be sent into space. But those evolutions will come, said Cabrol.
“Right now we’re at the same place we were 10 or 15 years ago, when we were starting to test Mars rovers in the desert,” she said.
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Until now, extraplanetary robotic explorers have been micromanaged from Earth.
But communication between Earth and Titan would take hours each direction, so the robot must be built with some decision-making and problem-solving capacity. Also, since rain and other weather phenomena occur on Titan, an exploration robot would need to know when something unusual is happening so it can stop what it’s doing and pay attention.
To do this, the robot will have to become familiar with its “normal” environment, and detect when something abnormal happens. For example, if the robot floats near shore, it will be able to recognize that and begin taking photographs and a series of scientific measurements.
This scientific autonomy is an evolution that is likely to take hold in all future extraplanetary robots, not just those that go to Titan, Cabrol said.
“We’re not only building a robot, but a new generation of robots,” she said. “The new generation will not just be sitting around waiting for us to tell them what to do.”
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 