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mmcirvinEmily Lakdawalla is blogging the Division of Planetary Sciences conference (see also the archives) of the American Astronomical Society (which, strangely, is in Cambridge, England; it's in association with the Royal Astronomical Society).
Anyway, she's got an amazing amount of information there. There's a lot in the past couple of days about Titan, and the tentative hypothesis that water-ammonia volcanism is responsible for many of the observed surface features. It strikes me that the same thing is still being proposed for the ongoing venting at the south pole of Enceladus, yet in both cases, nobody's actually detected the ammonia in the moons' atmospheres. I don't think the full story is understood yet.
In other Saturn news, if you scroll down here, you'll see that Saturn's mysterious ring spokes may finally have returned! The spokes were one of the strangest discoveries of the Voyager missions a quarter-century ago, and one goal of Cassini was to study them and find an explanation, but so far they just haven't been there. The Voyagers observed Saturn in its fall/spring, whereas Cassini arrived during northern hemisphere winter on Saturn. It was a plausible hypothesis that the spokes were a seasonal phenomenon, and would come back as Saturn approached equinox. That may have just been confirmed. There's no official announcement yet, though, so take this with a grain of salt.
Anyway, she's got an amazing amount of information there. There's a lot in the past couple of days about Titan, and the tentative hypothesis that water-ammonia volcanism is responsible for many of the observed surface features. It strikes me that the same thing is still being proposed for the ongoing venting at the south pole of Enceladus, yet in both cases, nobody's actually detected the ammonia in the moons' atmospheres. I don't think the full story is understood yet.
In other Saturn news, if you scroll down here, you'll see that Saturn's mysterious ring spokes may finally have returned! The spokes were one of the strangest discoveries of the Voyager missions a quarter-century ago, and one goal of Cassini was to study them and find an explanation, but so far they just haven't been there. The Voyagers observed Saturn in its fall/spring, whereas Cassini arrived during northern hemisphere winter on Saturn. It was a plausible hypothesis that the spokes were a seasonal phenomenon, and would come back as Saturn approached equinox. That may have just been confirmed. There's no official announcement yet, though, so take this with a grain of salt.