Moons+of+Saturn

Rubric: [[file:Space Exploration Adventure Rubric.doc]], [[file:Space Exploration Adventure Rubric.pdf]]

 * Written Information **: Saturn has 62 moons only 53 of them have names. I chose Titan (the largest of the 62), Calypso, Enceladus, and Pan (which people refer to as the walnut shaped moon.) Most of the moons were named after Greek gods or goddesses.

Visuals

**Works Cited** **Sources** :

__http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Calypso__ __rsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Sat_Titan__ __http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus_%28moon%29__ __http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/saturn/pan.html__
 * Your Source List:**

**Topic: Research Focus**


 * My topic is Saturn's moons.**
 * The focus of my research is four of Saturn's moons Titan, Calypso, Enceladus, and Pan. To also learn who founded these planets.**

**Notes** **Titan** Titan is the biggest of the 53 known moons orbiting Saturn. It is a cold world enclosed by a thick, hazy atmosphere impenetrable by telescopes and cameras.

With an equatorial radius of 2,575 km (1,600 miles), Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system. It's bigger than our own Moon and even the planet Mercury. Only Jupiter's moon Ganymede is larger than Titan, with a diameter barely 112 km (62 miles) greater.

The temperature at Titan's surface is about -289 degrees Fahrenheit (-178 degrees Celsius).

Titan orbits Saturn at a distance of about 1.2 million km (745,000 miles), taking almost 16 days to complete a full orbit.

Titan is of great interest to scientists because it is the only moon in the solar system known to have clouds and a mysterious, thick, planet-like atmosphere. In 1980, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft tried to take close up images of the natural features of Titan's landscape, but was unable to penetrate the thick clouds. Instead, the images showed only slight color and brightness variations in the atmosphere. Titan's atmospheric pressure is about 60 percent greater than the Earth's -- roughly the same pressure found at the bottom of a swimming pool.

In 1994, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope recorded pictures of Titan, which suggested that a huge bright "continent" exists on the hemisphere that faces forward in orbit. These Hubble results don't prove that liquid "seas" exist, however; only that Titan has large bright and dark regions on its surface.

NASA's Cassini HHuygen's spacecraft (currently orbiting Saturn) should shed new light on Titan's mysteries. The spacecraft's instruments are designed to reveal many of Titan's characteristics. During dozens of flybys, the Cassini orbiter will map Titan with cloud-penetrating radar and collect atmospheric data. The Huygens probe dove through Titan's dense atmosphere on 14 January 2005 with instruments capable of analyzing its components.

Combined with the "big picture" information that the Cassini orbiter will collect during Titan flybys, data from the Huygens probe will provide scientists with critical information that may shed light on ancient questions such as "Where did we come from?" and, "How did the planets form?"

Because of the extremely cold temperatures typical of celestial bodies that are that far away from the sun, the structure of Titan's chemical atmosphere is in a state of deep freeze. It is this chemical composition that interests scientists a great deal because Titan's atmosphere might consist of compounds similar to those present in the primordial days of the Earth's atmosphere. Titan's thick cloudy atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth's, but may contain much higher percentages of "smog-like" chemicals such as methane and ethane. The smog may be so thick that it actually rains "gasoline-like" liquids. The organic nature of some of the chemicals found in Titan's atmosphere might indicate that this fascinating moon co


 * Discovery:**

Titan was discovered on 25 March 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens.


 * How Titan Got it's Name:**

The name Titan comes from a generic term for the children of Ouranos and Gaia. In the Orphic version, the Titans are the ancestors of the human race. The Titans were known to have devoured the limbs of Dionysus, the son of Zeus. Enraged, Zeus struck the Titans with lightning. (Zeus had intended this child to have dominion over the world.) The lightning burned the Titans to ashes, and from the ashes man was formed. __http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Sat_Titan__


 * Pan**


 * Size:** Roughly 20 kilometers


 * Orbital radius:** 133,583 kilometers - 2.22 Saturn radii - within the Encke gap in the A ring


 * Orbital period:** 0.575 days - about 1/28 of Titan’s

Pan orbits within the Encke gap, inside Saturn’s A ring. However, Pan wasn't discovered by taking images of this gap -- it was discovered because its tiny gravitational tugs cause wave patterns in the A ring. From the wave patterns, scientists deduced the existence of a ring, and discovered it by returning to Voyager images of the rings. Images that Cassini captured during its closest-ever approach to the rings, when it was entering Saturn orbit, show stunning details in the density waves raised by Pan on the inner edge of the Encke gap. __http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/saturn/pan.html__
 * Discovery:** 1990 by Mark R. Showalter


 * Enceladus**

Enceladus is the sixth-largest of the moons of Saturn. It was discovered in 1789 by William Herschel. Until the two //Voyager// spacecraft passed near it in the early 1980s very little was known about this small moon besides the identification of water ice on its surface. The Voyagers showed that the diameter of Enceladus is only 500 kilometers (310 mi), about a tenth of that of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and that it reflects almost all of the sunlight that strikes it. //Voyager 1// found that Enceladus orbited in the densest part of Saturn's diffuse E ring, indicating a possible association between the two, while //Voyager 2//revealed that despite the moon's small size, it had a wide range of terrains ranging from old, heavily cratered surfaces to young, tectonically deformed terrain, with some regions with surface ages as young as 100 million years old. __http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus_%28moon%29__


 * Calypso**

Calypso is a Trojan (trailing moon) of the larger moon Tethys. Calypso trails Tethys in its orbit by 60 degrees. (Telesto is the other Tethys Trojan, orbiting Saturn 60 degrees ahead of Tethys.) Calypso is 22 km (14 miles) across. Like many other small Saturnian moons and small asteroids, Calypso is irregularly shaped by overlapping large craters. This moon appears to also have loose surface material capable of smoothing the appearance of craters.
 * Discovery:**

Calypso was discovered by D. Pascu, P.K. Seidelmann, W. Baum, and D. Currie in March 1980 using a ground-based telescope.
 * How Calypso Got its Name:**

Moons of Saturn were originally named for Greco-Roman Titans and descendants of the Titans. But as many new moons were discovered scientists began selecting names from more mythologies, including Gallic, Inuit and Norse stories. Calypso (kuh-LIP-soh) was a nymph whose name means "I hide." A daughter of the Titans, Oceanus and Tethys, she lived alone on her island until she fell in love with the explorer Odysseus (called Ulysses by the Romans; his name means "one who suffers"). Calypso helped Odysseus find his way home after his long voyage and dangerous adventures. __http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Calypso__