"On Valentines Day 1990, 13 years after leaving earth Voyager 1 was asked to turn it's cameras back towards the planets. Now 3.7 billion miles away, by the time Voyager's pitifully weak signal reached the dishes on earth it was just a millionth of a billionth of a watt of power" .. said the narrator at 1:16 of the video .. bit later "a unique family portrait..." .. so cool .. on Valentines Day .. lol ..
a m... of a b..., is pretty small, eh .. wonder how that compares with the yearly wage of an average person in the lowest ordinary person paid country in the world against the total earnings of all in a normal earth year
Ultraviolet and infrared images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft and Hubble Space Telescope show active and quiet auroras at Saturn's north and south poles.
Saturn's auroras glow when energetic electrons dive into the planet's atmosphere and collide with hydrogen molecules. Sometimes a blast of fast solar wind, composed of mostly electrons and protons, creates an active aurora at Saturn, as occurred on April 5 and May 20, 2013.
The first set of images, as seen in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum by Hubble, shows an active aurora dancing around Saturn's north pole on April 5. The movie then shows a relatively quiet time between April 19 to 22 and between May 18 and 19. The aurora flares up again in Hubble images from May 20. This version, shown in false-color, has been processed to show the auroras more clearly.
A second set of ultraviolet images shows a closer view of an active north polar aurora in white. This set comes from Cassini ultraviolet imaging spectrograph observations on May 20 and 21.
The last set of images, in the infrared, shows a quiet southern aurora (in green) in observations from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer on May 17. Saturn's inner heat glows in red, with dark areas showing where high clouds block the heat.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Colorado/Central Arizona College and NASA/ESA/University of Leicester and NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Lancaster University
By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer June 22, 2014 01:00pm ET
Scientists are as giddy as an enchanted snowman, as summer solstice approaches on Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
With more sunlight shining on the moon's northern hemisphere, Titan is revealing new secrets, such as a mysterious bright object that researchers have dubbed the "magic island."
The spots are among the first hints that Titan's methane and ethane lakes may be stirring in response to the summer warmth, similar to how lakes on Earth respond to the changing seasons. Until now, the lakes were extraordinarily smooth [ http://www.space.com/10512-saturn-moon-lake-ontario-shallow-virtually-wave-free.html ]. Scientists found the smoothness puzzling, however, because Titan's surface has wind-driven features such as dunes.
Researchers hope that Titan's summer may brew up storms, as happens on Earth. "Now that we're going into the summer solstice, we're looking to find whatever active processes might be powered by the [sun]," Hofgartner said.
"This is some of the best science ever to come out [of] Titan, and we still have three more years to make discoveries," he said.
The team's excitement is reminiscent of Olaf the snowman from Walt Disney Pictures' hit movie "Frozen." In the film, Olaf longs to "see a summer breeze" and "find out what happens to solid water when it gets warm!" Only Olaf wouldn't need magic to survive on Titan.Titan's surface temperature is just below methane's freezing point — minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 183 degrees Celsius). Because Titan is 10 times farther from the sun than Earth is, the temperature difference between summer and winter is much less dramatic, Hofgartner said. When the solstice peaks in 2017, temperatures will be just a few degrees warmer than in winter, he said.
Titan is the only body besides Earth in the solar system with lakes, rivers and small seas. Scientists think the summer solstice may warm the moon's lakes enough to release gases (the aforementioned bubbles) or chunks of methane ice. Some models suggest that moisture and heat rising from the lake surfaces might even trigger small-scale tropical cyclones [ http://www.space.com/14133-saturn-moon-titan-methane-rain-forecast.html ], similar to hurricanes on Earth.
The amount of sunlight in Titan's northern hemisphere has been slowly building since 2009, and will top out in 2017, the researchers said. Titan's north pole region was dark when the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004.
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