Slashdot Mirror
Hubble Telescope Shows Giant View of Saturn
An anonymous reader writes "The giant planet, Saturn, offers the best Southern view of its spectacular rings only three times a century. The Hubble Space Telescope astronomers published this seasonal glimpse today, in infrared, ultraviolet and visible spectral bands. The Hubble also first penetrated the changing face of Saturn's biochemically rich moon, Titan, which will be the ambitious target of a landing mission - the Cassini-Huygens probe in 294 days (July 1, 2004). Because Titan changes both spatially and temporally based on observations of its atmosphere, speculation of what drives these variations derives from the moon's high content of methane and other organic building blocks."
An object doesn't have to strike it to break up. If a comet or such come too close it can brake up just because of the gravitational forces. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet was a good example of this process.
In Soviet Russia, the profit overlords welcome you!
...to this...
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
For more information on this most famous of Saturns moons, read Titan by Stephen Baxter.
Incidentally, I was somewhat poleaxed reading the opening chapter, which features a catastrophic shuttle reentry. This seemed most prescient.