Mysterious beauty of Saturn

Scientists want to study the Saturn system in detail because they believe it will shed light on basic questions about chemistry, physics, planet formation and the conditions that lead to life. Four years of detailed investigation of the Saturn system helped them to first understand how different components interact with each other.

Initial discoveries

Located between Jupiter and Uranus, Saturn is 1.43 billion kilometers from the Sun - or ten times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Just smaller than Jupiter, Saturn is primarily made up of hydrogen and helium, making it the most liquid planet in our solar system. Three NASA spacecraft - Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 - flew across the planet with many ice-filled dust halo in 1979, 1980 and 1981. However, Cassini-Huygens was the first probe. tasked to study Saturn system.

Frosty Dione satellite seems to fly over Saturn's belt (Photo: NASA)

According to scientists, Saturn is a cold and windy place. The temperature at the top of the clouds reaches -139 degrees Celsius and the wind sweeps through its equator with a speed of 500m / sec. US $ 3.4 billion Cassini spacecraft (named after the Italian-born French astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini has many important discoveries about Saturn) and the Huygens probe that Cassini carries on his back (okay Named after Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, the discoverer of Saturn's Titan moon) was launched on October 15, 1997 from Cape Canaverral, Florida.

The Cassini-Huygens vessel traveled 3.5 billion km to Saturn, after passing through Venus, Earth and Jupiter to get more thrust. As expected, Cassini slipped through a 1,006-kilometer hole between two of the planet's ice and ice rings. It opened one of the main engines to slow down when studying the two rings of ice. After that, it turned out and went into one of 76 expected orbits. Scientists from the project hope an antenna like a shield will prevent any kind of dust from damaging the spacecraft as it passes and studies ice rings. As soon as it was in safe orbit, Cassini-Huygens directed the antenna to relay data to Earth.

The 35 satellites orbiting Saturn have been named extending and are only a few miles away from Titan and Mercury.Made of rock, methane, ammonia and carbon dioxide, some satellites were formed at the same time as Saturn's birth.Others have a larger body structure, which can be separated from large collisions on the planet.And some like Phoebe may be " intruders " acquired when wandering somewhere in the early Solar system. Pan, the most recently identified satellite, provides a distance Encke by clearing dust particles around. Prometheus and Pandora adhered to the belt of F. Janus and Epimetheus, the newly discovered rings. Frosty Enceladus is located on the E belt, this may be a large lake. Tethys, Dione and Rhea have thick layers of ice. Titan could be a planet that gives people life with the atmosphere, weather, and liquefied methane. Hyperion may be the remains of a larger satellite. Lapetus, probably the most unfamiliar satellite, has a bright hemisphere and the rest is extremely dark.

Giant planet

Viewed from above the north pole, Saturn looks like a microscopic solar system with belts spanning nearly 165,000 miles and 56 known satellites scattered more than 10 million miles from the planet.This picture shows the placement in the order of distance of each satellite.Saturn is the sixth planet in the solar system, 890 million miles wide and the second largest planet after Jupiter.Beneath that deep atmosphere is a layer of metallic hydrogen gas.The rings, arranged over time, reveal how these planets form around young stars.Large belts contain thousands of smaller belts to keep the belt molecules from disappearing.Other satellites help maintain belt spacing;Minas's attraction keeps molecules from being sucked into belt B and into the Cassini region - which French astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini discovered in 1675.

For a long time, planetary systems, dust rings full of ice and moon of Saturn as well as Jupiter are considered the physical models of the process of planet formation. They are called miniature solar systems. Planetary researcher Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona said: "The spacecraft's research will help us understand that process ."

Titan - Saturn's largest moon - is also a major target of Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. Titan's surface is covered by a thick layer of fog and has never been studied in detail. However, scientists believe that its atmosphere has many organic materials and can be similar to Earth before life evolved. Lorenz said: " Earth before the beginning of life may not be as light and cold as Saturn but underwent many similar chemical processes that have long been destroyed. We can study those chemical processes on Titan '' .

Looking from Earth, Saturn is light yellow and one of the brightest celestial bodies in the night sky. The main material on this planet is hydrogen so its density is 8 times worse than Earth. The thickening of Saturn's atmosphere makes the air pressure as close to the ground as possible, turning hydrogen gas into liquid. The deeper into the heart, the liquid hydrogen compresses into metallic hydrogen, which is electrically conductive and is the agent of the magnetic field on this planet. The deepest part of Saturn's mind is a small stone core with a temperature of up to 15,000 degrees Celsius. Saturn rings were first discovered by astronomer Galileo in 1610, by one of the first telescopes he created. These belts are made of stone, solid gas and ice.

Hidden beauty is discovered

Formed from billions of billions of stone molecules, the average thickness of Saturn's rings
about 150 feet. Since birth hundreds of millions of years ago,
perhaps from a satellites or sucked star (Photo: Nationalgeographic)

If we are on Saturn, the second largest planet of the solar system, then perhaps at night, there is no need for . street lights. The large number of the planet's 35 satellites are sufficient to receive the Sun's light and reflect it to the ground most brilliantly. According to the latest scientific surveys, for many Saturn satellites, only Titan satellites have a surrounding atmosphere. What's even more interesting is that there are many factors that show what happened on Titan as the image of our Earth since primitive time.

From one edge to the other, the main belts span about 165,000 miles, occupying over two-thirds of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. However, the thickness of these rock layers averages only about 150 feet, which is equivalent to a sheet of white paper spread out over 10-foot fields. Until today, after many studies, scientists still do not have an answer about how these rings form, although there are some theories that Saturn's attraction is the cause of their formation.

The lacing structure is seen on belt F captured by Voyager 1

Orbits of two nearby satellites Pandora and Prometheus

At present Saturn rings, tiny planets play an important role on the planet and the gravitational pull of planets around Saturn helps to keep these rings by not letting the molecule " escape ". from "their orbit. A planet can also connect a distance between their belts and suction to send dense waves that attach to an adjacent belt, which is like a car accelerating and slowly decreasing. speed when meeting the crowd on the highway.

On December 25, 2004, Huygens detached his mother ship Cassini afterward, personally carrying out the most important missions of space science: landing on a surface with Titan, through a thick fog. . During the two and a half hours of falling slowly to Titan, Huygens sampled the atmosphere, starting a microphone to record the sound emitted from the environment. Scientists want to know if there is thunder in Titan's atmosphere and on the surface of the moon there are seas containing liquefied methane and ethane gas as hypothesized by researchers earlier.

Saturn's largest Titan, satellite (Photo: NASA)

Scientists have recorded the first images transmitted by Cassini that show that Titan's surface has a pale orange color covered by a thin layer of methane gas . The researchers found shapes that looked like methane-laden seas with misty islands and coasts. From Huygens' microphone, they heard a noise that still had not been identified. A picture taken from a height of 16 km shows dark lines that can be riverbeds, on which liquid flows into a dark area is predicted to be a sea of ​​liquefied gas. On a dark background, there are some bright patches that can be floating islands in the middle of methane. Most noteworthy are two photos taken on Titan's surface, one that shows ice-like material scattered on the orange-yellow surface covered with methane gas.

"We found signs of liquefied methane scattered in large valleys on Titan's surface. Titan looked like the arid deserts of Africa but where the rain just fell like that. Even once a millennium can become floods. Deep pits can be traces of those rains, "said Larry Soderblom, USGS astronomy professor. Cassini will return to the southernmost area of ​​Enceladus again in 2008 to continue to discover the secrets of this satellite as well as Titan with many different objectives. The most important goal scientists want to achieve is to find the place where life exists for people. " We will write new histories in mankind once people set foot and live on this planet, " said Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona, one of the scientists who joined the Cassini-Huygens ship.

Images taken by the Huygens probe show material blocks that look like ice
scattered on the orange yellow surface covered with methane gas (Photo: NASA)

Beautiful images of Saturn

Minh Tu