Saturn (Sol VI)

 Saturn
Saturn as seen by Cassini in March 2004 Saturn orbits the Sun at a distance of 1,427 million kilometres. It takes 29 and one-half years to complete one of these orbits. It is a jovian planet with a diameter of 120,000 km. The other jovian planets (jupiter-like) are Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Saturn has many moons. It also has beautiful rings made of orbiting rocks and ice particles which you can see with a small telescope.

At this moment, the Cassini spacecraft is orbiting Saturn and the Huygens lander is on the surface of Titan, a giant moon of Saturn. Cassini-Huygens is a joint project of NASA and ESA and you can find out more about it at the NASA Saturn site and at the ESA site.

Lakes on Titan

Cassini has supported suspicions aroused by the Huygens landing, that Titan has lakes on its surface. These are not lakes of water as we know on Earth; they are most likely ethane or methane, which are stable as liquids in the intense cold environment of Saturn's enigmatic moon. Repeated observations should begin to show variations in the surface of these proposed lakes which would confirm their liquid state.

Lakes on Titan

Cassini arrived in orbit around Saturn in July 2004, after travelling through space for seven years. It has a four-year mission to investigate Saturn and its moons and is equipped with an array of cameras, spectrometers, radar and radio equipment, and instruments for detecting magnetic fields, plasmas and small particles down to atomic size.
The Cassini Spacecraft 		The Huygens lander was launched from Cassini on Christmas Day 2004 and travelled under its own automatic control to Titan, landing safely on the 14th of January 2005. It carries a number of instruments that allow it to analyze the atmosphere of Titan and to take pictures of the surface. Its impact instrument detected that it has landed on a muddy surface. What constitutes mud on Titan is very different from mud on Ea rth. It is so cold on Titan that ice is effectively solid rock and rivers and seas flow with hydrocarbons like lighter fluid.
The probe was only designed to operate for a few hours gathering data. Then it sent all of it back to Earth and scientists will be busy for years analyzing this new information.
The surface of Titan as seen by Huygens
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