Titan's Tides: Looking for Life in Lunar Lakes and Oceans by Washington Post, Adapted by Newsela Staff on 08.31.16 Word Count 615 Level 950L

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Titan's Tides: Looking for Life in Lunar Lakes and Oceans by Washington Post, Adapted by Newsela Staff on 08.31.16 Word Count 615 Level 950L Titan's tides: Looking for life in lunar lakes and oceans By Washington Post, adapted by Newsela staff on 08.31.16 Word Count 615 Level 950L TOP: The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa looms large in this newly reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. BELOW: An artist's conception of Europa; a composite image of Enceladus; a composite image of Titan; an image of Earth from space. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute; NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI; NASA; NASA; NASA There's more water throughout the solar system than you might expect. In space, water is everywhere. It's frozen in flying chunks of space rock. It's floating in the atmospheres of gas giants, huge planets composed mostly of gas. Perhaps most remarkable of all, it's sloshing around in huge oceans beneath the icy crusts of distant moons. These moons are known as "ocean worlds." If there is life in our solar system beyond Earth, there's a good chance it lives on one of these moons. Dozens of scientists met Thursday at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a research center for marine science, to discuss how we might explore ocean worlds. It would be a long trip, taking us to the freezing outer edges of the solar system. But there are plenty of beaches to stop at along the way. (You may not want to go swimming, though.) Here are This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. a few of the most interesting ocean worlds. Europa This moon of Jupiter has the smoothest surface of any object in the solar system. It has a thick, icy crust with reddish marks that scientists think could be deposits of salt from an interior sea. The ocean beneath Europa's crust is kept from freezing due to "tidal heating." This means the act of orbiting Jupiter keeps the moon's interior warm. Europa might share some important characteristics with the oceans on Earth. Earlier this year, a NASA study suggested that the moon might have the right balance of chemicals to allow life to form there. NASA is currently planning a mission to do several long flybys of Europa. Enceladus Enceladus is one of Saturn's moons. In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft noticed something strange near its surface. Jets of water vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases were exploding from cracks near the moon's south pole. Beneath the moon's surface, volcanic activity stirs up a liquid ocean. Scientists think that life on Earth first evolved around similar vents, or openings, on the sea floor. This connection makes Enceladus exciting to scientists. Carolyn Porco is a team leader for the Cassini mission. She said Thursday that the moon shows promise. Some scientists think it may be the best place in the solar system to look for life, she said. This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. Ganymede Ganymede is Jupiter's largest moon, and the largest moon in our solar system. It is also the only moon with its own magnetic field. Researchers think Ganymede has a large, salty ocean between two layers of rock. It could even have several oceans packed in between layers of ice, kind of like a strange club sandwich. Titan Saturn's largest moon is the only place in the solar system known to have liquid lakes on its surface (other than Earth). This far-flung moon is super cold. The average surface temperature is minus-292 degrees Fahrenheit. The lakes are filled with methane and ethane, rather than water, which would freeze. Scientists think that a liquid ocean layer below Titan's surface causes the moon to change and deform in response to Saturn's gravitational pull. Titan has been called the most Earth-like world ever discovered. It could, in theory, support life. Earth There are parts of Earth's oceans that are as unknown to scientists as any extraterrestrial sea. Scientists didn't discover lifeforms around deep-sea vents until 1977. Before then, they thought the dark, deep ocean must be a lifeless place. Now they see more possibilities to discover strange new life in the deep sea as they do in space. "Of all the earthbound sciences," said Chris German, a scientist at Woods Hole, "the ocean sciences might be about as close to possible as the science of space." This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com..
Recommended publications
  • Pale Blue Dot Carl Sagan Pdf
    Pale blue dot carl sagan pdf Continue This article is about photography. For other purposes, see Pale Blue Dot (disambigation). Photo Planet Earth Voyager 1 of about 6 billion kilometers visible from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), the Earth appears as a tiny dot in deep space: a bluish-white speck almost halfway to the brown stripe on the right. Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU) as part of a series of images of the solar system that day. In the photo, the visible size of the Earth is smaller than the pixel; The planet looks like a tiny dot against the backdrop of the expanses of space, among the bands of sunlight reflected by the camera. Voyager 1, which completed its main mission and left the solar system, was ordered by NASA to deploy the camera and take the last photograph of Earth in space at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan. The phrase Pale Blue Dot was coined by Sagan himself in his reflections on the meaning of photography documented in his 1994 book of the same name. In September 1977, NASA launched the 722-kilogram Voyager 1 robotic spacecraft (1,592 pounds) with a mission to study the space solar system and, eventually, interstellar space. After meeting with the Jovian system in 1979 and Saturn's system in 1980, the main mission was announced to have been completed in November of that year.
    [Show full text]
  • 11.10 Authorpge UKUS.Indd MH SA.Indd
    Vol 449 | Issue no. 7163 | 11 October 2007 AUTHORS water in addition to Abstractions MAKING THE PAPER organic materials LAST AUTHOR Carolyn Porco and warmer tem- Genetic mutation is central peratures, we may to evolution, but mutations have stumbled upon that improve one aspect Spacecraft’s images suggest one of a habitable zone in of a protein’s function can Saturn’s moons may host water. our Solar System. compromise another. Until This is an explorer’s recently, gene duplication The Cassini spacecraft took seven years to dream come true.” was thought to lead to the reach Saturn. But for Carolyn Porco, who The next step development of genes with novel functions, leads the Cassini imaging team at the Space was to determine as one copy of the gene would be free to Science Institute (SSI) in Boulder, Colorado, the locales of the evolve while the other performed its original the images it sent back were well worth the jets. Porco asked function. But this, it turns out, rarely happens wait. Most exciting of all was the revelation SSI planetary sci- — more often, an original gene’s functions that one of the planet’s moons may have the entist Joseph Spitale to triangulate the surface are simply split between the two copies. essential ingredients to support life. locations of each jet. To ensure that the meas- Sean Carroll, at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, and his student Chris Hittinger A veteran of the 1980s Voyager space mission, urements were made without prejudice, she devised a series of assays to trace how two Porco was well aware that the outer Solar System didn’t tell him her hypothesis of an association genes — GAL1 and GAL3 — in the yeast is not the barren wasteland it was once thought between the hot spots and the jets.
    [Show full text]
  • A Farewell to Saturn 21 November 2017
    Cassini image mosaic: A farewell to Saturn 21 November 2017 team leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Cassini imaging team had been planning this special farewell view of Saturn for years. For some, when the end finally came, it was a difficult goodbye. "It was all too easy to get used to receiving new images from the Saturn system on a daily basis, seeing new sights, watching things change," said After more than 13 years at Saturn, and with its fate Elizabeth Turtle, an imaging team associate at the sealed, NASA's Cassini spacecraft bid farewell to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Saturnian system by firing the shutters of its wide-angle camera and capturing this last, full mosaic of Saturn and Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland. "It was hard to say its rings two days before the spacecraft's dramatic goodbye, but how lucky we were to be able to see it plunge into the planet's atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL- all through Cassini's eyes!" Caltech/Space Science Institute In a fitting farewell to the planet that had been its home for over 13 years, the Cassini spacecraft took one last, lingering look at Saturn and its splendid rings during the final leg of its journey and snapped a series of images that has been assembled into a new mosaic. Cassini's wide-angle camera acquired 42 red, green and blue images, covering the planet and its Annotated Version. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space main rings from one end to the other, on Sept.
    [Show full text]
  • NASA Releases Images of Earth by Distant Spacecraft 23 July 2013
    NASA releases images of earth by distant spacecraft 23 July 2013 taken from interplanetary distances. NASA invited the public to celebrate by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet. More than 20,000 people around the world participated. "We can't see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were on July 19," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Cassini's picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth." Color and black-and-white images of Earth taken by two NASA interplanetary spacecraft on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space. NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet. In the Cassini images Earth and the moon appear as mere dots—Earth a pale blue and the moon a stark white, visible between Saturn's rings.
    [Show full text]
  • People in Astronomy Contents
    People in Astronomy Contents INTERVIEWS Jeff Hoffman p.3 Carolyn Porco p.6 Gibor Basri p.10 Sandra Faber p.13 3 People in Astronomy How did you enjoy being in space? JEFF HOFFMAN are used to working on mountaintops, and spaceAnswering is the as ultimate an astronomer mountaintop. first, astronomers Actually, for me, working on the Astro mission [a set of ultraviolet telescopes carried on a space shuttle] was unique, because my professional work had been x-ray astronomy using satellites, so I had never actually done anything with traditional optical-type telescope in my life was in space, buttelescopes. my three The astronomer-astronaut first time I guided colleagues an actual let me do it anyway. Since I had spent most of my professional career building x-ray telescopes Jeffrey Hoffman is a NASA Scientist-Astronaut. He grew up near New York City, and went into the city every month or so to visit the theto fly fun in of rockets being inand space satellites, goes beyond it was whatgratifying your American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden actualto fly with mission some is. telescopes No matter on what board. you Of are course, doing Planetarium. After graduating from Amherst up there, it is an incredible view, an incredible College (Amherst, Massachusetts) in 1966, feeling. But working as an astronomer on one he attended graduate school in astronomy at Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1971. satisfaction. He then worked in England with the x-ray of my space flights gave me a lot of professional astronomy group at the University of Leicester What did it feel like to repair the for 3 years.
    [Show full text]
  • Carolyn Porco Imaging Science Team Leader, NASA Cassini Mission
    2014 HARCOURT C. “ACE” VERNON MEMORIAL LECTURE October 15, 2014 | 7:30 PM | Clayton Hall Conference Center A Decade at Saturn Carolyn Porco Imaging Science Team Leader, NASA Cassini Mission One of Time magazine’s “25 most influential people in space” Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco will help you see Saturn and its spectacular rings with new eyes. She leads the imaging team on NASA’s Cassini mission orbiting Saturn. Porco will provide a sweeping tour of Saturn and all that Cassini has found there since its arrival in summer 2004, with a finale that brings into sharp focus the significance of humanity’s interplanetary explorations. Free and open to the public. Majestic Saturn in the Infrared. This false-color composite image was made Please register online at mountcuba.org from 65 individual, 6-minute-long observations by the visual and infrared Sponsored by Delaware Asteroseismic Research Center at UD (www.physics.udel.edu/darc) mapping spectrometer aboard NASA’s and Mount Cuba Astronomical Observatory (mountcuba.org) Cassini spacecraft. The Ringed Planet. Cassini’s ultraviolet view reveals that there is more ice toward the outer part of Saturn’s rings than in the Saturn Fun Facts inner part. The red indicates sparser ringlets likely made of “dirty,” and possibly smaller, particles than in the icier turquoise Saturn, named for the Roman god of farming, is the second ringlets. Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University largest planet in our solar system. of Colorado Because Saturn is made mostly of gases, it’s the only planet that could float in water. You’d need a really big bathtub! Saturn’s main rings could almost stretch from Earth to the moon.
    [Show full text]
  • Circling Saturn: Carolyn Porco on Her Celestial Trip 19 April 2010, by ROBERT NAEYE
    Circling Saturn: Carolyn Porco on her Celestial Trip 19 April 2010, by ROBERT NAEYE making it the centerpiece, she says, of “a rich, complex planetary system.” Two of them, Titan and Enceladus, hold special interest for Porco and her NASA colleagues, who believe these moons may help to answer questions about the origins of life. The researchers have identified several additional small moons, including one that orbits within the rings themselves. Porco made her mark in the 1980s as a member of the Voyager imaging team, which used data from NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 to study Saturn’s rings. In particular, she calculated how the gravitational influence of several small moons has sculpted the sharp edges of Saturn’s rings and narrow ringlets Unlike the Voyagers, which flew past Saturn and will never return, the $3.4 billion Cassini has settled into orbit around the planet. Cassini is providing far superior images, which reveal new levels of detail Photograph by Tony Rinaldo (c) 2010 and structure in the rings. As Porco explained to her audience during the last installment in the 2009-2010 Dean’s Lecture Series, the same physics and mathematics that govern the giant (PhysOrg.com) -- Carolyn Porco is on a mission. spiral arms in galaxies like our Milky Way can As she explained to an audience of several explain waves in Saturn’s rings that were created hundred gathered at the Radcliffe Gymnasium by sizable moons. Some of the rings’ features give earlier this month, in a lecture titled “At Saturn: us a glimpse into the solar system’s distant past, Tripping the Light Fantastic,” this mission is when the planets were forming within a huge disk nothing less than “to understand how our small of gas and dust surrounding the Sun.
    [Show full text]
  • Cassini's Ringside Seat
    Cassini’s Ringside Seat Saturn’s rings and moons are a model for how planetary systems may be forming around nearby stars. The Cassini spacecraft has been taking a close look at the rings of late, and it turns out that gravity and granules with momentum can do some amaz- ing things. Of all the planets in our solar system, only one’s got a whole lot of bling. Yet, for most of human history, we didn’t know about Saturn’s luminous rings, even though the gigantic, gaseous planet is readily visible in the night sky. When Galileo became the first person to peer at Saturn through a telescope in 1610, he sketched a compan- ion moon on each side. A couple of years later, he became utterly perplexed when the moons vanished. When the mysterious objects returned, he saw them as elliptical arms resembling handles. In 1655, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, using a better telescope, figured out that the arms were actually a flat ring and that, like the edge of a sheet of paper held horizontally at eye level, it disappeared from view when Saturn’s tilt presented it to us edge-on. (The rings truly are paper-thin—a mere 10 to 20 meters thick on average, and yet so broad that they would fit neatly between Earth and 22 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE SPRING 2010 Opposite: Linda Spilker, Cassini’s project sci- entist, with one of the Deep Space Network’s 34-meter dishes at Goldstone, California. Right: The Cassini orbiter. Below: The anatomy of Saturn’s rings.
    [Show full text]
  • New Horizons Pluto/KBO Mission Hal Weaver the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to Pluto and Beyond
    New Horizons Pluto/KBO Mission Hal Weaver The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory To Pluto and Beyond TheThe InitialInitial ReconnaissanceReconnaissance ofof TheThe SolarSolar SystemSystem’’ss ““ThirdThird ZoneZone”” KBOs Pluto-Charon Jupiter System 2016-2020 July 2015 Feb-March 2007 Launch Jan 2006 PI: Alan Stern New Horizons: Overview Science Team: New Horizons was one of PI: Alan Stern the consortia proposals Fran Bagenal Rick Binzel submitted for NASA’s Bonnie Buratti January 2001 request for Andy Cheng Dale Cruikshank mission proposals to flyby Randy Gladstone Pluto-Charon and the Will Grundy Kuiper Belt Dave Hinson Mihaly Horanyi Don Jennings New Horizons was selected Ivan Linscott Jeff Moore by NASA on 29 Nov 2001 Dave McComas Bill McKinnon New Horizons was funded Ralph McNutt Scott Murchie and approved to enter into Cathy Olkin full-scale development in Carolyn Porco Harold Reitsema March 2003 Dennis Reuter Dave Slater New Horizons was later John Spencer Darrell Strobel designated New Frontiers 1 Mike Summers Len Tyler Hal Weaver Leslie Young New Horizons Project Team SwRI and APL Teamed to Lead the Project SwRI leads the science team and payload and is the PI institution APL leads mission development & operations With Major Team Partners: Ball for the Ralph instrument NASA/GSFC for the LEISA IR focal plane Stanford for the REX radio science investigation Lockheed-Martin as the Atlas V ELV Boeing as the STAR-48B upper stage supplier Dept of Energy for the RTG JPL for DSN, Technical Analyses, & CoI support
    [Show full text]
  • CICLOPS Media Relations News Release
    CICLOPS Media Relations News Release Contact: Heidi Finn, 720-974-5859 [email protected] November 13, 2003 Porco joins Space Science Institute The Space Science Institute (SSI) of Boulder, Colorado announces the appointment of Dr. Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Imaging Science team for the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft and an Adjunct Professor at both the University of Colorado and the University of Arizona, to its senior research and management staff. Her move to SSI follows a distinguished 18-year research and teaching career at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and a two-year stint at the Southwest Research Institute, also in Boulder. Porco directs the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS), the hub of Cassini Imaging Science team activities. CICLOPS, together with SSI, has relocated to larger facilities in the Tierra Centre at 4750 Walnut Street. The new, larger accommodations will help meet a growing demand for more office and laboratory space to house CICLOPS operations, which will include the processing and dissemination of Cassini images and movies to the public. ‘It is unusual to find a non-academic organization that encourages the diversity of activities, creative freedom, and autonomy that one finds in a University environment. But that's what SSI is all about”, Porco says. “I feel the environment here suits my goals nicely.” The Space Science Institute is a non-profit organization of scientists and educators with a unique mission to integrate research in the areas of astrophysics, planetary science and the earth sciences with education and public outreach. In addition to NASA-and NSF-supported space science research programs, and now the Cassini Imaging Team flight operations, its activities include the development of science exhibitions for museums, professional development for teachers, educational workshops for scientists, and the creation of curricula, classroom activities, and online interactive educational resources associated with the national education standards in science, math, and technology.
    [Show full text]
  • A N N U a L R E P O R T 2
    Space Science Institute . 4750 Walnut Street . Suite 205 . Boulder, Colorado 80301 . 720.974.5888 . www.spacescience.org annual Report 2010 MEssAGE FrOM THE DirECTOr Excite. Explore. Discover. These words describe our efforts in both scientific research and education. In fact, they define the essence of our mission: to integrate world-class research with an innovative education program within a single institution. The Space Science Institute’s (SSI) Board of Directors, with its experience and expertise in a range of business, science, and educational areas, provides guidance and vision to our enterprise. They – along with our senior management – have created an environment that continues to draw world-class scientists to SSI and enables us to develop education and outreach programs that benefit millions of people worldwide. SSI’s 2010 revenues were $5.3M. SSI has a robust scientific Research Branch (Director, Dr. Michael Wolff) with scientists participating in robotic missions such as the Mars Exploration Rovers, in flight missions such as Spitzer and Hubble, and in ground-based observation programs using facilities located all over the world. Three new researchers joined the Research Branch last year: Athanasios Boudouridis (Research Scientist, Boulder, CO Office), Julianne Moses (Senior Research Scientist, Seabrook, TX Office), Alexey Pankine (Research Scientist, Arcadia, CA Office), and Erica Rogers (Research Scientist, Atchison, KS Office). SSI’s Flight OperationS Branch (Director, Dr. Carolyn Porco) is home to the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Our VisiOn Operations (CICLOPS). CICLOPS is the center for uplink and downlink operations for the imaging science experiment Expand humankind’s understanding and appreciation of on the Cassini mission to Saturn.
    [Show full text]
  • New Frontiers in Solar System Exploration
    THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS This PDF is available at http://www.nap.edu/10898 SHARE New Frontiers in Solar System Exploration DETAILS 32 pages | 8.5 x 11 | ISBN | DOI: 10.17226/10898 AUTHORS BUY THIS BOOK Solar System Exploration Survey, National Research Council FIND RELATED TITLES Visit the National Academies Press at NAP.edu and login or register to get: – Access to free PDF downloads of thousands of scientific reports – 10% off the price of print titles – Email or social media notifications of new titles related to your interests – Special offers and discounts Distribution, posting, or copying of this PDF is strictly prohibited without written permission of the National Academies Press. (Request Permission) Unless otherwise indicated, all materials in this PDF are copyrighted by the National Academy of Sciences. Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. New Frontiers in Solar System Exploration THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS Washington, D.C. www.nap.edu This booklet is based on the Space Studies Board report New Frontiers in the Solar System: An Integrated Exploration Strategy (available online at <http://books.nap.edu/html/newfrontiers /0309084954.pdf>). Details about obtaining copies of the full report, together with more information about the Space Studies Board and its activities, can be found at <http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ssb/>. New Frontiers in the Solar System was authored by the Solar System Exploration Survey. SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION SURVEY MICHAEL J.S. BELTON, Belton Space Exploration Initiatives, Chair CAROLYN PORCO, Space Science Institute, Vice Chair MICHAEL A’HEARN, University of Maryland JOSEPH A. BURNS, Cornell University RONALD GREELEY, Arizona State University JAMES W.
    [Show full text]