Sci-Fi Astronaut Drawing

Products of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Cyrano de Bergerac’s Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) and The States and Empires of the Sun (1662), Margaret Cavendish’s “The Blazing World” (1666), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Ludvig Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741) and Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) are regarded as some of the first true science-fantasy works. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Somnium the first science-fiction story; it depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earth’s motion is seen from there.


The astronomers then conducted an analysis called a Bouger correction in order to subtract the gravitational effect of topological features, such as valleys and mountains, from the total gravity field. What is then left is the gravity field hidden beneath the lunar surface, existing within its crust. "Titan is a very active moon. We already know that about its geology and exotic hydrocarbon cycle. Now we can add another analogy with Earth and Mars: the active dust cycle, in which organic dust can be raised from large dune fields around Titan's equator," Dr. Sebastien Rodriguez explained in a September 24, 2018 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Press Release. Dr. Rodriguez is an astronomer at the Universite Paris Diderot, France, and the paper's lead author. The JPL is in Pasadena, California. But there is an important difference. On our own planet, lakes and seas are flowing with water, while Titan's lakes and seas are filled primarily with methane and ethane, that slosh around within these liquid reservoirs. In this never-before-seen cycle, the hydrocarbon molecules evaporate and condense into clouds that send an exotic "rain of terror" back down to this strange moon-world's carbon-slashed surface.