Near Earth Asteroid 2011


The Face Behind The Veil. Titan is a little larger than Mercury--the smallest major planet inhabiting our Solar System. Indeed, Titan would have been classified as a major planet in its own right if it orbited our Sun instead of Saturn. The Huygens Probe images lifted the veil from the face of this distant moon-world, revealing a youthful surface that is both smooth and relatively free of impact craters. Huygens also found that this icy, hydrocarbon-saturated moon's climate includes those heavy rains of gasoline, as well as raging, roaring winds. Some of Titan's surface features were found to be hauntingly akin to certain surface features on Earth. "Ganymede's ocean might be organized like a Dagwood sandwich," commented Dr. Steve Vance in a May 1, 2014 statement. Dr. Vance, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, went on to explain the weird moon's resemblance to the Blondie cartoon character's famous multi-layered sandwiches. The study, headed by Dr. Vance, provides new theoretical indications for the team's "club sandwich" model, originally proposed in 2013. The research appears in the journal Planetary and Space Science. Therefore, even though Enceladus is only Saturn's sixth-largest moon, it is amazingly active. Because of the success of the Cassini mission, scientists now know that geysers spew watery jets hundreds of kilometers out into Space, originating from what may well be a vast subsurface sea. These jets, which erupt from fissures in the little moon's icy shell, whisper a siren's song to bewitched astronomers. This is because the jets suggest that the icy moon may harbor a zone where life might have evolved. The jets dramatically spray water ice from numerous fissures near the south pole, that have been playfully termed "tiger stripes." The "tiger stripes" look like giant scratches made by a tiger's raking claws.