At least four distinct plumes of water ice spew out from the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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What is going on inside Saturn’s moon Enceladus and what powers the icy geysers and jets? A pair of upcoming flybys by the Cassini spacecraft could help answer those questions. Radio instruments on board will measure the gravity field of Enceladus and focus particularly on the very intriguing south polar hot spot.
Of course, the success of these flybys hinges on the Cassini mission controllers being able to wake up the dormant spacecraft which has been in safe mode since November 2. Teams will attempt to get Cassini up and running again tomorrow, November 24, and they don’t anticipate any problems.
Cassini went into the protective standby mode and the likely cause of the problem was a faulty program code line, or a flipped bit in the spacecraft’s command and data system computer.
The upcoming flybys of Enceladus will put Cassini very close – about 48 kilometers (30 miles) above the surface. The first will take place on November 30. Pairing this flyby with one on April 28, should provide scientists enough information to determine the nature of the interior right under the hot spot. The next flyby on December 21, Cassini will make 50-kilometer pass over the north pole of Enceladus. The fields and particles instruments will be trying to “sniff” anything coming from the moon.
There will be two three-hour “wing” observations before and after closest-approach (from five to eight hours from closest approach on either side), and then three more hours centered directly around closest approach. The Cassini team is throwing almost the entire gamut of instruments into the flyby program, between radio science (RSS) observations, the imaging science system (ISS) and composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) which will observe this moon on the inbound leg, and CIRS and the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) which will take data on the outbound leg, with other optical remote sensing and fields, particles and waves instruments also taking data.
Vertical structures, among the tallest seen in Saturn's main rings, rise abruptly from the edge of Saturn's B ring to cast long shadows on the ring in this image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2009.
It has long been known that Saturn’s rings are not the perfect hoops they appear as in small amateur telescopes, and when the Cassini spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn, the wonky disorder of the massive B ring became even more apparent. Scientists were stunned by towering vertical structures, scalloped edges on the rings, and odd propeller-like features. But scientists have now found the cause of these strange features: The region is acting just like a spiral galaxy, said Carolyn Porco, team lead of the Cassini imaging team.
“We have found what we hoped we’d find when we set out on this journey with Cassini nearly 13 years ago,” said Porco, “(and have gotten) visibility into the mechanisms that have sculpted not only Saturn’s rings, but celestial disks of a far grander scale, from solar systems, like our own, all the way to the giant spiral galaxies.”
The B ring is one of the most dynamic areas in Saturn’s rings, and surprisingly, scientists say, the rings are behaving like a miniature version of our own Milky Way galaxy.
When the the Voyager spacecraft flew by Saturn in 1980 and 1981, scientists saw that the outer edge of the planet’s B ring was shaped like a rotating, flattened football by the gravitational perturbations of Mimas. But it was clear, even in Voyager’s findings, that the outer B ring’s behavior was far more complex than anything Mimas alone might do.
Vertical Structures Tower over Saturn’s B-Ring. This image was rendered using Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop. Credit: Kevin Gill.
Through the analysis of thousands of Cassini images of the B ring taken over a four-year period, Porco and her team have found the source of most of the complexity: at least three additional, independently rotating wave patterns, or oscillations, that distort the B ring’s edge.
The oscillations travel around the ring with differing speeds and the small, random motions of the ring particles feed energy into a wave that propagates outward across the ring from an inner boundary, reflects off the outer edge of the B ring (which becomes distorted as a result), and then travels inward until it reflects off the inner boundary. This continuous back-and-forth reflection is necessary for these wave patterns to grow and become visible as distortions in the outer edge of the B ring.
These oscillations, with one, two or three lobes, are not created by any moons. They have instead spontaneously arisen, in part because the ring is dense enough, and the B ring edge is sharp enough, for waves to grow on their own and then reflect at the edge.
The ring particles’ small, random motions feed energy into a wave and cause it to grow. The new results confirm a Voyager-era predication that this same process can explain all the puzzling chaotic waveforms found in Saturn’s densest rings, from tens of meters up to hundreds of kilometers wide.
“This process has already been verified to produce wave features in Saturn’s dense rings that are of small scale…about 150 meters or so,” Porco wrote in her “Captain’s Log” feature on the CICLOPS (Cassini imaging)website. “That it now also appears to produce waves of large, hundreds-of-kilometers scale in the outer B ring suggests that it can operate in dense rings on all spatial scales.”
“These oscillations exist for the same reason that guitar strings have natural modes of oscillation, which can be excited when plucked or otherwise disturbed,” said Joseph Spitale, Cassini imaging team associate and lead author of a new article in the Astronomical Journal, published today. “The ring, too, has its own natural oscillation frequencies, and that’s what we’re observing.”
Astronomers believe such “self-excited” oscillations exist in other disk systems, like spiral disk galaxies and proto-planetary disks found around nearby stars, but they have not been able to directly confirm their existence. The new observations confirm the first large-scale wave oscillations of this type in a broad disk of material anywhere in nature.
Self-excited waves on small, 100-meter (300-foot) scales have been previously observed by Cassini instruments in a few dense ring regions and have been attributed to a process called “viscous overstability.”
Oscillations in Saturn's B ring. Credit: Space Science Institute
“Normally viscosity, or resistance to flow, damps waves — the way sound waves traveling through the air would die out,” said Peter Goldreich, a planetary ring theorist at the California Institute of Technology. “But the new findings show that, in the densest parts of Saturn’s rings, viscosity actually amplifies waves, explaining mysterious grooves first seen in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft.”
“How satisfying it is to find at last one explanation for most, if not all, of the chaotic looking structure we first saw in Saturn’s dense ring regions long ago with Voyager,” said Porco, “and have since seen in exquisite detail with Cassini.”
Proposed 'Perrier' Ocean for Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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Bottled water companies take note: an exotic form of warm, bubbly mineral water could be what feeds the mysterious jets spraying from the south polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A new model of the sub-surface ocean explains how the small moon could be so cryo-volcanically active. The Cassini spacecraft has detected sodium and potassium salts, as well as carbonates in the water vapor plumes spewing from the moon, which indicates a liquid, bubbly subsurface ocean. “There is a plume chamber, where some of the bubbles can pop the cap of the thin ice crust, and through that process is how the plumes get sprayed out,” said Dennis Matson, a NASA planetary scientist from JPL, speaking at a press briefing at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena, California.
The schematic image (top) is laid on top of a picture of the Enceladus jets taken by Cassini’s imaging cameras in November 2009. It shows bubbles in subsurface seawater traveling through a passage in the ice crust to feed a geyser. The water flows back down to the subsurface ocean through cracks in the ice.
Matson explained the process:
“What we think is going on is that Enceladus has a subsurface ocean where water, heat and chemicals are stored before they erupt,” he said. There is an ice crust, many tens of kilometers thick. The ocean is gas rich, — and previous researchers dubbed such an ocean as a ‘Perrier’ ocean -– which basically “pops the cap” of the ice crust.
“What is happening is that water comes up and pressure is released,” said Matson. “Gases and water come out and the bubbles come near the surface and supply materials to the plumes. Water also transfers laterally, to a great extent, from the point of the plumes. This transfers heat to the surface, by analogy, like the radiator on your car. You have water coming out, which transfers heat to the thin ice layer, and then the heat is radiated to space. Cooled water goes down through cracks in the ice where it gets ready for another trip to the surface. “
This image compares heat flow at Earth and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL
Cassini also found an impressive amount of heat flow over a small area coming from Enceladus’ interior. About four years ago, Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer instrument detected a heat flow in the south polar region of at least 6 gigawatts, the equivalent of at least a dozen electric power plants. This is at least three times as much heat as an average region of Earth of similar area would produce, despite Enceladus’ small size.
“To put the heat flow in perspective,” said Matson, “the heat flow for the Earth has 87 of these units, but on the south pole of Enceladus, 250 units. At Yellowstone, there are 2500 units, but at one of the tiger stripe hots spots on Enceladus, we find heat flow as big as 13,000 units.”
The heat is, of course, relative to the surrounding environment. The subsurface bubbly water is probably just below freezing, which is 273 degrees Kelvin or 32 degrees Farenheit, whereas the surface is a frigid 80 degrees Kelvin or -316 degrees Farenheit. However, Matson said they have also seen surface temperatures as high as 180 K, when only 70 K was expected at the south pole.
Cassini imaging scientists used views like this one to help them identify the source locations for individual jets spurting ice particles, water vapor and trace organic compounds from the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA
Finding the sodium in the icy grains in the plume is huge piece of evidence pointing to a subsurface ocean. Previously, Earth-based observations did not detect salts in the plume, and so scientists didn’t think a liquid ocean was possible. But infrared observations with an instrument on Cassini found the particles in the plumes include water ice, and substantial amounts of sodium and potassium salts and carbonates, as well as organics.
“The sodium was hiding in the little grains,” Matson said. “In the case of Enceladus, sodium isn’t in the vapor, it’s in the solid particles. This was something entirely new that had not been seen elsewhere.”
Also new is that the heat from Enceladus appears to be originating in the ocean, and also the realization there is a circulation system inside the moon, where there is process of pumping the water to the surface.
“This process we’ve outlined, where getting the water up to the surface, you have the heat, the water, and sodium and potassium all from one source that brings that up to the surface. So you have one process that delivers all those things, whereas before we had separate processes to try and explain each of them.”
The plumes of Enceladus are highlighted in this Cassini image. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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What an astonishing view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as seen by Cassini! At least four different plumes of water ice are spewing out from the south polar region, highlighted because of the black space behind the Moon. On Twitter, Carolyn Porco said that we see four jets because we’re looking down the four tiger stripe fractures crossing the south pole. “How lovely it is to know!” she added.
Cassini was about 617,000 kilometers (383,000 miles) away from Enceladus when it captured this image.
Clouds on Titan seen by the Cassini spacecraft on Sept. 27. 2010. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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The Cassini spacecraft recently swooped by Saturn’s largest moon Titan and captured images of large patches of clouds. “These are some of the largest clouds our cameras on Cassini have yet seen on Titan!” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead, in an email announcing the image. “And the fact that we see them in the equatorial region is big news and may signify seasonal change is underway!”
The image was taken on September 27, 2010 and received on Earth September 28, 2010 at a distance of approximately 1,282,259 kilometers away. The spacecraft was actually at its closest approach on Sept. 24, and took a long, sustained look at the hazy moon, coming within 8,175 kilometers (5,080 miles) above the hazy moon’s surface.
Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer also took a look at these clouds, so look for more information soon about this large region of clouds.
Cassini also used its composite infrared spectrometer instrument to take a look at Titan’s stratosphere to learn more about its vertical structure as the seasons change.
This flyby is the first in a series of high-altitude Titan flybys for Cassini over the next year and a half.
Saturn's moons Dione and Rhea appear conjoined in this optical illusion-like image taken by the Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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This latest image from the Cassini spacecraft will make you do a double-take! It is an optical illusion, but the two moons appear like conjoined, identical twins! The two moons are fairly close in size, but Dione, the smaller of the two at the top in the image, is actually closer to the spacecraft, making the two look almost identical. And because of the similar albedo, or reflectivity, of the two moons and because of the location of a particularly large crater near the south polar region of Dione, the moon appears blended seamlessly with Rhea. Double your pleasure!
Dione is 1123 kilometers (698 miles) across and Rhea is 1528 kilometers (949 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 27, 2010.
Cassini crossed the radio aurora of Saturn on 17 October 2008, at a distance of 4 Saturn's radii above the atmosphere. These radio emissions, generated by fast electrons, are strongly beamed. They were characterised by simultaneous observations of three different experiments. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Iowa/CNES/Observatoire de Paris
Saturn’s mysterious aurora has fascinated astronomers and space enthusiasts since it was first observed back in 1979. Now, the Cassini spacecraft has made the first observations from within the giant radio aurora of Saturn. The spacecraft flew through an active auroral region in 2008, and scientists say there are both similarities and contrasts between the radio auroral emissions generated at Saturn and those at Earth. Additionally, Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS) took data to create a new movie (above) showing Saturn’s shimmering aurora over a two-day period. All this new data are helping scientists understand what drives some of the solar system’s most impressive light shows.
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“So far, this is a unique event,” said Dr. Laurent Lamy at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome this week. “Whereas the source region of Earth’s radio aurora has been studied by many missions, this is our first opportunity to observe the equivalent region at Saturn from the inside. From this single encounter, we have been able to build up a detailed snapshot of auroral activity using three of Cassini’s instruments. This gives us a fascinating insight into the processes that are generating Saturn’s radio aurora.”
See an animation created from the radio instrument on Cassini at this link. On the left hand side are the radio sources as seen from Cassini. The right hand side shows the projection of the radio sources down onto the southern pole of the planet. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Iowa/CNES/Observatoire de Paris
Separately, Tom Stallard, lead scientist on a joint VIMS and Cassini magnetometer collaboration, presented the VIMS movie at the conference.
In the movie, the aurora phenomenon clearly varies significantly over the course of a Saturnian day, which lasts around 10 hours 47 minutes. On the noon and midnight sides (left and right sides of the images, respectively), the aurora can be seen to brighten significantly for periods of several hours, suggesting the brightening is connected with the angle of the sun. Other features can be seen to rotate with the planet, reappearing at the same time and the same place on the second day, suggesting that these are directly controlled by the orientation of Saturn’s magnetic field.
Image of Saturn’s aurora seen at ultraviolet wavelengths. The spiral shape seen here is similar to the distorted radio aurora visualised by the team and also indicates enhanced auroral activity. Credit: ESA/NASA/Hubble
“Saturn’s auroras are very complex and we are only just beginning to understand all the factors involved,” Stallard said. “This study will provide a broader view of the wide variety of different auroral features that can be seen, and will allow us to better understand what controls these changes in appearance.”
Auroras on Saturn occur in a process similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights. Particles from the solar wind are channeled by Saturn’s magnetic field toward the planet’s poles, where they interact with electrically charged gas (plasma) in the upper atmosphere and emit light. At Saturn, however, auroral features can also be caused by electromagnetic waves generated when the planet’s moons move through the plasma that fills Saturn’s magnetosphere.
This false-color composite image shows Saturn’s rings and southern hemisphere. The composite image was made from 65 individual observations by Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer in the near-infrared portion of the light spectrum on Nov. 1, 2008. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Left: T43 flyby of Titan - 12 May 2008 – VIMS images a large cloud that caps the north pole of Titan (yellowish tones). Right: T63 flyby of Titan - 12 December 2009 – VIMS still observes a huge cloud system at 40°S (yellowish tones) and the north pole of Titan free of clouds, a few months after the equinox. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Nantes/ University of Paris Diderot
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The beauty of an extended space mission is that scientists can make long term observations and find out things we’ve never known before. The Cassini spacecraft’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument has been monitoring clouds on Titan continuously since the spacecraft went into orbit around Saturn in 2004, and a team led by Sébastien Rodriguez (AIM laboratory – Université Paris Diderot) has used more than 2,000 VIMS images to create the first long-term study of Titan’s weather. Are they ready to make a weather forecast? They say Titan’s northern hemisphere is set for mainly fine spring weather, with polar skies clearing since the equinox in August last year.
Together with Saturn in its 30-years orbit around the Sun, Titan has seasons that last for 7 terrestrial years. The team has observed significant atmospheric changes between July 2004 (early summer in the southern hemisphere) and April 2010, the very start of northern spring. The images showed that cloud activity has recently decreased near both of Titan’s poles. These regions had been heavily overcast during the late southern summer until 2008, a few months before the equinox.
“Over the past six years, we’ve found that clouds appear clustered in three distinct latitude regions of Titan: large clouds at the north pole, patchy cloud at the south pole and a narrow belt around 40 degrees south. However, we are now seeing evidence of a seasonal circulation turnover on Titan – the clouds at the south pole completely disappeared just before the equinox and the clouds in the north are thinning out. This agrees with predictions from models and we are expecting to see cloud activity reverse from one hemisphere to another in the coming decade as southern winter approaches,” said Dr Rodriguez.
Fractional cloud coverage in Titan’s atmosphere integrated between July 2004 and April 2010. Black areas are cloud free and yellow are fully covered. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Nantes/ University of Paris Diderot
The team has used results from the Global Climate Models (GCMs) developed by Pascal Rannou (Institut Pierre Simon Laplace) to interpret the evolution of the observed cloud patterns over time. Northern polar clouds of ethane form in the Titan’s troposphere during the winter at altitudes of 30-50 km by a constant influx of ethane and aerosols from the stratosphere. In the other hemisphere, mid- and high-latitudes clouds are produced by the upwelling from the surface of air enriched in methane. Observations of the location and activity of Titan’s clouds over long periods are vital in developing a global understanding of Titan’s climate and meteorological cycle.
In Feburary 2010, the Cassini mission was extended to a few months past Saturn’s northern summer solstice in May 2017. This means that Rodriguez and his team will be able to observe the seasonal changes right the way through from mid-winter to mid-summer in the northern hemisphere.
“We have learned a lot about Titan’s climate since Cassini arrived in at Saturn but there is still a great deal to learn. With the new mission extension, we will have the opportunity to answer some of the key questions about the meteorology of this fascinating moon,” said Rodriguez.
Rodriguez presented the results at the European Planetary Science Congress 2010 in Rome.
Saturn’s moons as you’ve never seen them before! By day, Dr. Paul Schenk works at the Lunar and Planetary Institute mapping the topography and geology of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, as well as the icy bodies of the outer solar system. But because “it’s just plain cool,” he has created some flyover videos of Saturn’s satellites, using data from the Cassini spacecraft. Very cool, indeed! Above is a close-up, 3-D look at the walnut-shaped moon Iapetus. Scientists don’t know why there is a ridge along the moon’s equator, but in 2007, Cassini acquired a strip of color and stereo images along the ridge, and Schenk has created a flyover which shows the contrast in color and topography. There are “sharp peaks 15 to 20 kilometers above the surrounding dark cratered plains,” Schenk writes. “These are among the highest peaks in the Solar System. Patches of bright pure water ice can be seen flanking these dark peaks, which have the brightness of soot.”
And there’s more! Below is one of my favorites from Schenk’s collection of flyover videos, 3-D views of Inktomi, a very young crater on the moon Rhea.
Caption: Looking down at a plume on Enceladus. Credit: NASA/Space Science Science Institute.
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Oh, wow! This is one of the best images yet from the Cassini spacecraft of the “tiger stripes” in the south polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Over the weekend, Cassini flew by Enceladus, and has sent back some incredible new images, such as the one above. The tiger stripes are actually giant fissures that spew jets of water vapor and organic particles hundreds of kilometers, or miles, out into space, and here, Cassini is staring right down into one of the fissures. See more great images of Enceladus below, plus images of the moons Dione and Tethys.
Close-up of the cracked, crevassed surface of Enceladus. Credit: NASA/Space Science Institute.
While the winter is darkening the moon’s southern hemisphere, Cassini has its own version of “night vision goggles” — the composite infrared spectrometer instrument – to track heat even when visible light is low. It will take time for scientists to assemble the data into temperature maps of the fissures.
Enceladus against Saturn's limb. Credit: NASA/Space Science Institute. More plumes on Enceladus. Credit: NASA/Space Science Institute. Close-up of Tethys. Credit: NASA/Space Science Institute
Dione from 115,370 kilometers away. Credit: NASA/Space Science Institute
