PASADENA, Calif. – Saturn’s giant moon Titan refused to give up its secrets Friday as the Cassini spacecraft flew by for the first time and peered into its murky atmosphere to try to see its surface.
“It’s not as clear as we’d hoped,” Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco said as unprocessed images transmitted across 900 million miles of space arrived at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“We haven’t applied our full bag of tricks yet,” she said.
Cassini will make many more flybys of Titan and in December will launch a probe that will enter the moon’s atmosphere in January.
Titan was Cassini’s first encounter since the spacecraft began orbiting Saturn this week.
Cassini transmitted about 21/2 hours of data and images collected as it passed by Titan at a distance of about 200,000 miles.
Mission scientists, meanwhile, released initial findings of clues to the composition, origin and lifespans of Saturn’s spectacular rings.
The seven major rings, known alphabetically as A through G, are believed to be made of boulders ranging from a few feet across to the size of cars.
But Cassini’s detection of a short-lived, unevenly distributed bloom of atomic oxygen in the Saturn system earlier this year suggests the rings may contain larger objects.
After measuring the system with its ultraviolet imaging spectrograph for two weeks beginning Dec. 25, Cassini found the massive amount of extra oxygen when it repeated the process about a month later.
Larry Esposito, a planetary scientist from the University of Colorado, said the event supports a theory that the rings contain objects one to 10 kilometers across. Collisions between such objects would release a large amount of ice, from which atomic oxygen would be stripped by other forces.
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