Titan’s winds surprise researcher
MOSCOW, Idaho – Wind patterns on Saturn’s giant moon Titan show a surprising pattern, with a band in the middle atmosphere where the wind drops to almost nothing, a researcher who had an experiment aboard the unmanned Titan lander says.
“It’s sort of a surprise. The winds are about 200 or more miles an hour at 130 kilometers up, then they get very, very low near the surface,” University of Idaho Professor David Atkinson said Monday. “The real surprise was there was a region in the middle of the atmosphere, where the winds dropped about 60 to 80 kilometers up, where the winds dropped almost to zero.”
Atkinson said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press that no place on Earth has similar wind patterns. The discovery could help scientists better understand atmospheric variations in the solar system, he said.
Atkinson thought he lost 18 years of work when someone forgot to turn on the radio receiver to relay data from his experiment on board the unmanned mission that landed on Titan in January.
But with the help of his students, he has managed to recover enough of the lost data from the Doppler wind measurement experiment to map the moon’s wind patterns. “At best we had one-eightieth of the data, and there were a few larger gaps than that,” Atkinson told the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. “But we were able to get a remarkably accurate wind measurement.”
His experiment was on board the Huygens surface lander that separated from its mother ship, the Cassini orbiter circling Saturn. As the lander dropped through Titan’s thick atmosphere, it sent data back to Cassini to relay to Earth. But someone forgot to turn on one of two receivers on Cassini, leaving much of Atkinson’s data lost in space.
Radio antennas on Earth were able to pick up faint signals from the lander, though it was only a small portion of the data that would have been grabbed by the Cassini receiver – forcing Atkinson to come up with new ways to analyze the results.
Jessie Malecha, an engineering student at the University of Idaho, will help reconstruct the data this summer during an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
“If we can understand this, it will help us understand the weather on the Earth so much better,” Atkinson said. “This is where the fun really starts.”
Titan is the largest moon in the solar system and the only moon known to have an atmosphere. It was selected for exploration because scientists think it could unlock secrets to Earth’s formation. Atkinson began work on the Cassini mission in 1987. It was launched 10 years later.