{"id":219689,"date":"2014-04-07T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-07T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"03aa44f0bd55dfb19ac1081e6c73026f"},"modified":"2014-04-07T04:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-07T08:00:00","slug":"cassini-captures-familiar-forms-on-titans-dunes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=219689","title":{"rendered":"Cassini captures familiar forms on Titan\u2019s dunes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\nThe moons of our Solar System are brimming with unusual landscapes. However, sometimes they look a little more familiar, as in this new radar image from the Cassini orbiter. The image shows dark streaks carved into dunes reminiscent of those we might find on a beach on Earth, or raked with flowing lines in a Japanese Zen garden \u2014 but this scene is actually taking place on Saturn\u2019s moon Titan.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhile our sand is composed of silicates, the \u2018sand\u2019 of these alien dunes is formed from grains of organic materials about the same size as particles of our beach sand. The small size and smoothness of these grains means that the flowing lines carved into the dunes show up as dark to the human eye.\n<\/p>\n

\nThese grains are shunted around by winds shifting over the moon\u2019s surface. These winds aren\u2019t particularly fast \u2014 only moving at around 1 m\/s \u2014 but they blow in opposing directions throughout the year, causing Titan\u2019s \u2018sand\u2019 to pile up in certain places over time.\n<\/p>\n

\nTitan seems to be full of features and phenomena that are quite familiar to those found on Earth. Since Cassini arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, and dropped off ESA\u2019s Huygens probe in 2005, scientists have been studying the similarities between Titan and Earth by exploring sand dunes, channels and lakes of liquid ethane and methane scattered across its surface.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhile previous images have spotted these eerily familiar patterns on Titan\u2019s dunes, this new image shows them in greater detail. The image was obtained by Cassini\u2019s Titan radar mapper on 10 July 2013, by a team led by Steve Wall at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, USA. The horizontal seam near the centre is an artifact of radar image data processing.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Cassini\u2013Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\nThe moons of our Solar System are brimming with unusual landscapes. However, sometimes they look a little more familiar, as in this new radar image from the Cassini orbiter. The image shows dark streaks carved into dunes reminiscent of those we might find on a beach on Earth, or raked with flowing lines in a Japanese Zen garden \u2014 but this scene is actually taking place on Saturn\u2019s moon Titan.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhile our sand is composed of silicates, the \u2018sand\u2019 of these alien dunes is formed from grains of organic materials about the same size as particles of our beach sand. The small size and smoothness of these grains means that the flowing lines carved into the dunes show up as dark to the human eye.\n<\/p>\n

\nThese grains are shunted around by winds shifting over the moon\u2019s surface. These winds aren\u2019t particularly fast \u2014 only moving at around 1 m\/s \u2014 but they blow in opposing directions throughout the year, causing Titan\u2019s \u2018sand\u2019 to pile up in certain places over time.\n<\/p>\n

\nTitan seems to be full of features and phenomena that are quite familiar to those found on Earth. Since Cassini arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, and dropped off ESA\u2019s Huygens probe in 2005, scientists have been studying the similarities between Titan and Earth by exploring sand dunes, channels and lakes of liquid ethane and methane scattered across its surface.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhile previous images have spotted these eerily familiar patterns on Titan\u2019s dunes, this new image shows them in greater detail. The image was obtained by Cassini\u2019s Titan radar mapper on 10 July 2013, by a team led by Steve Wall at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, USA. The horizontal seam near the centre is an artifact of radar image data processing.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Cassini\u2013Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-multimedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=219689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=219689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=219689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=219689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}