Saturn

Alicia Strauss Automotive technician apprentice, Saturn of Ellicott City Age: 18 Years in business: one Salary: $8 an hour Typical day: During the summer, she started her day at 8 a.m. and it ended at 5 p.m., except on Tuesdays when she worked until 7 p.m. and Saturdays when she worked until 2 p.m. Strauss was teamed with an experienced technician when working on cars. The work includes inspecting automobiles to detect problems and making repairs. She works on 10 to 15 cars each day. The technology: Strauss says the job is much more high-tech than most people think.

The possible discovery of an ice volcano on Saturn's moon Titan might solve one of the lingering mysteries about the strange satellite with the smog-choked atmosphere. Scientists have wondered for decades where the methane in Titan's atmosphere came from. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Most of that atmosphere is made up of nitrogen, with up to 3 percent of it composed of methane. Investigators theorized that it could have come from a methane-rich hydrocarbon ocean that covered much of the moon.

This morning, the Huygens probe is scheduled to parachute down to the surface of Titan, one of the most mysterious unexplored bodies in the solar system, and send back the first pictures from the moon. Source: NASA

It would be stretching things to say the space spectaculars on tap for 2005 will have millions more of us out in the back yard peering up into the night sky. That's because the most astonishing celestial events on the stargazing calendar in 2005 are likely to require more time in front of a TV or a computer than out under a sparkling dark sky. For example, on Jan. 14, if all goes well, millions may be watching as the Huygens probe -- released Friday from...

It's considered the most mysterious corner of the solar system: a secretive, smog-shrouded world nearly a billion miles from the sun, where volcanoes spew frozen ammonia slush and liquid natural gas rains down from the skies. At least that's what scientists think might be going on beneath the amber-hued haze of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. For nearly four centuries, the moon's thick atmosphere has stymied every attempt to get a clear picture of the its surface. But Titan's secret life may be coming to an end. Just after 11 tonight, NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft is scheduled to spring loose a piggyback probe called Huygens.

PASADENA, Calif. - The first radar images of Saturn's smoggy moon Titan show what appears to be a large lake, rolling ridges and lava-like flows of ice or ammonia, researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here said yesterday. The images from the Cassini spacecraft provide the best evidence yet that liquid lakes, or even seas, exist on Titan's surface, team members said. The potential lake was christened "Si-Si the Halloween Cat" in honor of a scientist's daughter who first recognized the feline resemblance in its shape.

PASADENA, Calif. - After staying up much of the night analyzing the first close-up images of Titan's smog-shrouded surface, groggy scientists admitted yesterday that they were befuddled by much of what they were seeing of Saturn's strange moon. Was that ice on top of the continent-sized landmass they've named Xanadu? Were the dark patches along its western boundary a gasoline slush? What are the clouds doing at the south pole? And where is the methane coming from? There were few answers forthcoming despite the bounty of images and other data sent by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Cassini spacecraft late Tuesday.

Space scientists hope to get their first close-up view of one of the solar system's most confounding objects tonight as the Cassini spacecraft passes within 745 miles of Saturn's smoggy moon Titan. Using an array of infrared and radar imaging instruments, Cassini will attempt to peer through methane clouds to glimpse a landscape that has always been shrouded from Earth-based observers. Scientists have speculated that within Titan's orange haze, gasoline-type substances might fall like rain on a frozen landscape of rock-hard ice and hydrocarbon pools resembling a toxic chocolate sundae.

A 3-year-old Reisterstown boy was killed early yesterday in a three-vehicle crash on the Baltimore Beltway, Maryland State Police said. The boy, Parker Rothering, and his parents, Kelly M. Rothering and David J. Rothering, both 33 and of the first block of Hanover Road, had been in a Dodge Grand Caravan that was merging from York Road to the outer loop of Interstate 695 when the crash occurred about 12:30 a.m., police said. Police said Parker appeared to have been properly secured in a child safety seat in the back seat.

More than a dozen years after Maryland scientists and engineers began designing it, an instrument package called MIMI has finally reached Saturn - one of 12 aboard NASA's $3.3 billion Cassini spacecraft. By all accounts, the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument is working perfectly. On Cassini's first loop past Saturn, MIMI's three sensors sent back reams of data on the invisible swarm of atomic particles that whiz around the planet, trapped in its powerful magnetic field. "Gosh, it's beyond our wildest hopes," said University of Maryland physicist Douglas C. Hamilton.