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Artist concept of a dust storm on Titan. The moon of Saturn is the third world, after Earth and Mars, known to have dust storms.
Credit: IPGP / Labex UnivEarthS / Paris Diderot University – C. Epitalon & S. Rodriguez
The images of the 1930s captured the immensity of the American Dust Bowl, and modern clichés reveal gigantic "haboob" dust storms that roll intensely over the Sahara Desert. Now, astronomers have taken pictures in a surprisingly similar way on a totally foreign site: they observed dust storms on Saturn's moon, Titan.
The discovery of dust storms that cross the equatorial region of Titan makes the moon the third body of the solar system, after Earth and Mars, known to have storms.
According to NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), data from the Cassini mission helped researchers uncover Titan's dust storms. Cassini's mission to Saturn and the many moons of the planet lasted from 2004 to 2017, when the spacecraft plunged into the clouds of the planet as a crown to disintegrate. The death dive prevented from contaminating the Saturn system with terrestrial microbes. [Amazing Pictures of Titan, Saturn’s Largest Moon]
Luminous dots appear in this animation, based on images of the captured Cassini probe with its visual and infrared mapping (VIMS) spectrometer during several Titan flyovers in 2009 and 2010. A research team interpreted these features as storms of dust.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona / Paris Diderot University / IPGP / S. Rodriguez et al. 2018
"Titan is a very active moon," Sebastien Rodriguez said in a statement from NASA and ESA. Rodriguez is an astronomer at Paris Diderot University in France and the main author of the article, published Monday, September 24, detailing the results of the team.
"We already know … its geology and its exotic hydrocarbon cycle," he said. "Now we can add another analogy with Earth and Mars: the active dust cycle."
Just as the Atlantic Ocean produces the hurricane season on Earth, methane and ethane on Titan form powerful storms near its equator as the sun evaporates these hydrocarbon molecules. This unique methane cycle was first detected by the Rodriguez team, when they spotted three strange equatorial highlights in some Cassini infrared images.
A compilation of images of Cassini's nine flybys of Titan in 2009 and 2010. In three cases, clear dots suddenly appeared on the images taken by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer of the spacecraft.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona / Paris Diderot University / IPGP / S. Rodriguez et al. 2018
Initially, the team thought that the bright spots of Titin's northern equinox images in 2009 and 2010 of Cassini were only these methane clouds.
According to the statement from the space agency, the researchers used models indicating that these features were related to the atmosphere of Titan, but located near the surface. The team ruled out the ground as a cause because the earth formations would have a different chemical signature and would obviously remain more visible than the spots. The bright spots "were visible only for 11 hours to 5 weeks," ESA officials said.
As the features were close to the surface and located on the dune fields around Titan's equator, the team deduced that the bright dots were clouds of dust moving through the deserts distant.
The study detailing the results was published Monday, Sept. 24 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter@salazar_elin. follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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