Washington: A team of scientists has urged NASA to probe the ice giant Uranus and look for life on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, on priority in the coming decade.In a report, the team at National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS), recommended NASA to focus on three high-level scientific themes: origins, worlds and processes, and life and habitability, in the next 10 years, Zdnet reported.Despite the fact that ice giant systems are the most common form of planets in the universe, there is a "dearth of knowledge" about them, said Robin Canup, co-chair of the NAS steering committee for the decadal survey, in a statement.Ice giants are the only class of planet in our solar system that hasn't had a dedicated orbital tour. The Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) should be NASA's highest priority large mission, the report said.The UOP aims to conduct a multi-year orbital tour to transform knowledge of ice giants in general, and the Uranian system in particular, through flybys and the delivery of an atmospheric probe."Uranus is one of the most intriguing bodies in the solar system," the report said."Its low internal energy, active atmospheric dynamics, and complex magnetic field all present major puzzles. A primordial giant impact may have produced the planet's extreme axial tilt and possibly its rings and satellites, although this is uncertain." Further, the report stated that NASA's next priority should be the Enceladus Orbilander - a mission to search for evidence of life on Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn.The mission would take place from orbit and during a two-year landed mission that would perform detailed studies of fresh plume material coming from Enceladus' interior ocean.The comprehensive decadal report also evaluated a wide range of other missions.It lauded the progress made studying Mars, as well as NASA's Discovery Programme. It also stresses the potential for combining human and robotic exploration in space.The report also focused on planetary defence - the effort to detect and track objects like asteroids that could pose a threat to life on Earth.It recommends a focus on enhancing near-Earth object (NEO) detection, tracking, and characterisation capabilities, as well as the improving NEO modeling and prediction. It also suggests developing technologies for NEO deflection and disruption missions. —IANS

 A team of scientists has urged NASA to probe the ice giant Uranus and look for life on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, on priority in the coming decade. In a report, the team at National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS), recommended NASA to focus on three high-level scientific themes: origins, worlds and processes, and life and habitability, in the next 10 years, Zdnet reported.

Scientists Urge NASA To Probe Uranus, Search For Life On Saturn's Moon

 A team of scientists has urged NASA to probe the ice giant Uranus and look for life on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, on priority in the coming decade. In a report, the team at National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS), recommended NASA to focus on three high-level scientific themes: origins, worlds and processes, and life and habitability, in the next 10 years, Zdnet reported.





Washington: Scientists have compiled 41 solar occultation observations of Saturn's rings from the Cassini mission. The compilation will inform future investigations of the particle size distribution and composition of Saturn's rings, key elements to understanding their formation and evolution.
"For nearly two decades, NASA's Cassini spacecraft shared the wonders of Saturn and its family of icy moons and signature rings, but we still don't definitively know the origins of the ring system," said Dr. Stephanie Jarmak, a researcher in the SwRI Space Science Division. "Evidence indicates that the rings are relatively young and could have formed from the destruction of an icy satellite or a comet. However, to support any one origin theory, we need to have a good idea of the size of particles making up the rings." Cassini's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) was uniquely sensitive to some of the smallest ring particles, particularly with the observations it made in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength. To determine the size of the ring particles, UVIS observed them when the instrument was pointed at the Sun, looking through the rings in what is known as a solar occultation. Ring particles partially blocked the path of the light, providing a direct measurement of the optical depth, a key parameter for determining the size and composition of the ring particles.
"Given the wavelength of the light coming from the Sun, these observations gave us insight into the smallest particle sizes with Saturn's rings," Jarmak said. "UVIS can detect dust particles at the micron level, helping us understand the origin, collisional activity and destruction of the ring particles within the system."
The compilation also delves into the variations in the optical depth of occultation observations, which can help determine particle size and composition. During an occultation, light emitted by a background source, such as the Sun, is absorbed and scattered by the particles in the light's path. The amount of light blocked by ring particles provides a direct measurement of the ring optical depth.
Including optical depth is vital to understanding the structure of the rings. The research measured the optical depth as a function of the viewing geometry, which refers to the observation angles of the ring system with respect to the Cassini spacecraft. As light passing through the rings changes at various angles, scientists can form a picture of the rings' structures.
"Ring systems around giant planets also provide test beds for investigating fundamental physical properties and processes in our solar system in general," Jarmak said. "These particles are thought to result from objects colliding and forming in a disk and building up larger particles. Understanding how they form these ring systems could help us understand how planets form as well." —ANI

Scientists have compiled 41 solar occultation observations of Saturn's rings from the Cassini mission. The compilation will inform future investigations of the particle size distribution and composition of Saturn's rings, key elements to understanding their formation and evolution.

Scientists Compile Cassini's Unique Observations Of Saturn's Rings

Washington: An upcoming NASA mission to Saturn's giant moon Titan aims to discover the development of life in the universe, the US space agency said. The mission called Dragonfly is due to launch in 2027, and will reach Titan in 2034. Dragonfly carries an instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), which will shed light on the kinds of chemical steps that occurred on Earth that ultimately led to the formation of life, called prebiotic chemistry. Titan's abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and past presence of liquid water on the surface make it an ideal destination to study prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment, the mission officials said in a statement. DraMS will allow scientists back on Earth to remotely study the chemical makeup of the Titanian surface. "We want to know if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan," Dr Melissa Trainer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. To accomplish this, the Dragonfly robotic rotorcraft will capitalise on Titan's low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between different points of interest on Titan's surface, spread as far as several miles apart. This allows Dragonfly to relocate its entire suite of instruments to a new site when the previous one has been fully explored, and provides access to samples in environments with a variety of geologic histories. At each site, samples less than a gram in size will be drilled out of the surface by the Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics (DrACO) and brought inside the lander's main body, to a place called the "attic" that houses the DraMS instrument.  There, they will be irradiated by an onboard laser or vaporised in an oven to be measured by DraMS. "DraMS is designed to look at the organic molecules that may be present on Titan, at their composition and distribution in different surface environments," Trainer said. Organic molecules contain carbon and are used by all known forms of life. They are of interest in understanding the formation of life because they can be created by living and non-living processes. —IANS

An upcoming NASA mission to Saturn's giant moon Titan aims to discover the development of life in the universe, the US space agency said. The mission called Dragonfly is due to launch in 2027, and will reach Titan in 2034.

NASA Mission To Saturn's Moon May Unravel Chemistry Leading To Life

An upcoming NASA mission to Saturn's giant moon Titan aims to discover the development of life in the universe, the US space agency said.
The mission called Dragonfly is due to launch in 2027, and will reach Titan in 2034.

Toronto: An international team of astronomers has discovered 62 new moons orbiting Saturn, taking the total number to 145.
The planet is back into first place in the Solar System's 'moon race' after being briefly overtaken by gas giant Jupiter. The new discoveries mean that Saturn has not only regained its crown for having the most known moons (overtaking Jupiter with 95 recognised moons), but it's also the first planet to have over 100 discovered moons, said researchers at the University of British Columbia(UBC).
Jupiter, which added 12 moons to its tally in February, has 95 moons that have been formally designated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
"Saturn not only has nearly doubled its number of moons, it now has more moons than all the rest of the planets in the solar system combined," said Prof Brett Gladman, an astronomer at the UBC, the Guardian reported.
The new moons, which have been assigned strings of numbers and letters for now, will eventually be given names based on Gallic, Norse and Canadian Inuit gods, in keeping with convention for Saturn's moons.
All of the new moons are in the class of irregular moons, thought to be initially captured by their host planet long ago. Irregular moons are characterised by their large, elliptical, and inclined orbits compared to regular moons.
The number of known saturnian irregular moons has more than doubled to 121, with 58 previously known before the search began. Including the 24 regular moons, there is now a total of 145 recognised by the IAU.
The irregular moons tend to clump together into orbital groups based on the tilt of their orbits.
The team, led by Dr. Edward Ashton, who started the research project at UBC, and currently a postdoctoral fellow at Taiwan's Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, used data taken using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii between 2019 and 2021.
By shifting and stacking many sequential images taken during three hour spans, they were able to detect moons orbiting Saturn down to about 2.5 kilometres in diameter.
The original discovery search was done in 2019, uncovering the moons in a meticulous search of the deep CFHT imaging acquired that year.
To be absolutely sure, objects must be tracked for several years before they can be designated as certainly orbiting the planet. After painstakingly matching objects detected on different nights over two years, the team managed to track 62 objects, confirming them as new moons. —IANS

An international team of astronomers has discovered 62 new moons orbiting Saturn, taking the total number to 145.

Saturn Beats Other Planets With Most Number Of Moons In Solar System

New York: A water vapour plume from Saturn's moon Enceladus spanning more than 6,000 miles has been detected by researchers using the world's premier space science observatory James Webb Space Telescope. Using the data from scientists can also, for the first time, take a direct look at how this emission feeds the water supply for the entire system of Saturn and its rings. Enceladus, an ocean world about 4 per cent the size of Earth, just 313 miles across, is one of the most exciting scientific targets in our solar system in the search for life beyond Earth. Sandwiched between the moon's icy outer crust and its rocky core is a global reservoir of salty water. Geyser-like volcanoes spew jets of ice particles, water vapour, and organic chemicals out of crevices in the moon's surface informally called 'tiger stripes'. "When I was looking at the data, at first, I was thinking I had to be wrong. It was just so shocking to detect a water plume more than 20 times the size of the moon," lead author Geronimo Villanueva from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "The water plume extends far beyond its release region at the southern pole." In addition to the length of the plume, the team found that the water vapour is gushing out, about 79 gallons per second, which can fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just a couple of hours. "The orbit of Enceladus around Saturn is relatively quick, just 33 hours. As it whips around Saturn, the moon and its jets are basically spitting off water, leaving a halo, almost like a donut, in its wake. In the Webb observations, not only was the plume huge, but there was just water absolutely everywhere," said Villanueva. This fuzzy donut of water that appeared 'everywhere', described as a torus, is co-located with Saturn's outermost and widest ring - the dense 'E-ring'. The Webb observations, available as a pre-print on Nature Astronomy, directly demonstrate how the moon's water vapour plumes feed the torus. By analysing the Webb data, astronomers have determined roughly 30 per cent of the water stays within this torus, and the other 70 per cent escapes to supply the rest of the Saturnian system of water. In the coming years, Webb will serve as the primary observation tool for ocean moon Enceladus, and discoveries from Webb will help inform future solar system satellite missions that will look to explore the subsurface ocean's depth, how thick the ice crust is, and more. Webb is an international programme led by NASA with its partners, European Space Agency (ESA), and Canadian Space Agency (CSA). —IANS

 A water vapour plume from Saturn's moon Enceladus spanning more than 6,000 miles has been detected by researchers 

Webb Telescope Maps Large Plume Jetting From Saturn's Moon

New York: Saturn has long-lasting megastorms with impacts deep in the atmosphere that persist for centuries, according to a new study. Previously, only Jupiter was known to have megastorms. The largest storm in the solar system, a 10,000-mile-wide anticyclone called the Great Red Spot, has also decorated Jupiter's surface for hundreds of years. "Understanding the mechanisms of the largest storms in the solar system puts the theory of hurricanes into a broader cosmic context, challenging our current knowledge and pushing the boundaries of terrestrial meteorology," said lead author Cheng Li, formerly at Universities of California-Berkeley and now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. For the new study, astronomers looked at radio emissions from Saturn, which come from below the surface, and found long-term disruptions in the distribution of ammonia gas. They found something surprising in the radio emissions from the planet: anomalies in the concentration of ammonia gas in the atmosphere, which they connected to the past occurrences of megastorms in the planet's northern hemisphere. According to the team, the concentration of ammonia is lower at mid-altitudes, just below the uppermost ammonia-ice cloud layer, but has become enriched at lower altitudes, 100 to 200 kilometres deeper in the atmosphere. They believe that the ammonia is being transported from the upper to the lower atmosphere via the processes of precipitation and re-evaporation. The effect can last for hundreds of years. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, further revealed that although both Saturn and Jupiter are made of hydrogen gas, the two gas giants are remarkably dissimilar. While Jupiter does have tropospheric anomalies, they have been tied to its zones (whitish bands) and belts (darkish bands) and are not caused by storms like they are on Saturn.  The considerable difference between these neighbouring gas giants is challenging what scientists know about the formation of megastorms on gas giants and other planets and may inform how they're found and studied on exoplanets in the future. —IANS

Saturn has long-lasting megastorms with impacts deep in the atmosphere that persist for centuries, according to a new study

Storms Can Last For 100 Years On Saturn: Study

London: A team of planetary scientists has found that Saturn's late northern summer is experiencing a cooling trend, as huge planetary-scale flows of air have reversed direction as autumn approaches. The new observations, based on an analysis of new images taken by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), also provided a last glimpse of Saturn's north pole, with its enormous warm vortex filled with hydrocarbon gases, before the pole begins to recede into the darkness of polar winter. The findings, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets by the University of Leicester researchers, provides new insights into the changing seasons on the massive outer planet, famous for its icy rings. Like Earth, Saturn has an axial tilt and experiences seasons in the same way. However, Saturn takes 30 years to orbit the sun, so the seasons last for 7.5 Earth-years. Northern-hemisphere summer on both worlds is now coming to an end. While Earth is heading for the northern autumn equinox in September, Saturn is heading for the northern autumn equinox in 2025, which means the north poles of both planets are heading for extended periods of polar winter. "The quality of the new data from JWST is simply breath-taking -- in one short set of observations, we've been able to continue the legacy of the Cassini mission into a completely new Saturnian season, watching how the weather patterns and atmospheric circulation respond to the changing sunlight," said Professor Leigh Fletcher, from the varsity’s School of Physics and Astronomy. In the image, created by combining just a few of the wavelengths observed by MIRI on JWST, the bright thermal emission from the north pole stands out in blue. The warm 1500-km wide north polar cyclone (NPC), which was first observed by the Cassini mission, can be seen at the north pole. This is surrounded by a broader region of warm gases called the north-polar stratospheric vortex (NPSV), which formed in Saturnian spring and has persisted throughout its northern summer. These are warm vortices high in the stratosphere, heated by the sun's warmth during Saturn's long summer season. As autumn equinox approaches in 2025, the north polar stratospheric vortex will begin cooling down and will disappear as the northern hemisphere recedes into the darkness of autumn. "JWST can see in wavelengths of light that were inaccessible to any previous spacecraft, producing an exquisite dataset that whets the appetite for the years to come. This work on Saturn is just the first of a programme of observations of all four giant planets, and JWST is providing a capability beyond anything we've had in the past -- if we can get so many new findings from a single observation of a single world, imagine what discoveries await?" Fletcher said. —IANS

A team of planetary scientists has found that Saturn's late northern summer is experiencing a cooling trend

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Scientists Urge NASA To Probe Uranus, Search For Life On Saturn's Moon

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Scientists Urge NASA To Probe Uranus, Search For Life On Saturn's Moon

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