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Weather Report from Saturn's Moon Titan


Using data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the Keck II telescope, astronomers found evidence of cloud convection in the northern hemisphere of Titan.

“Titan is the only other place in our Solar System that has weather like Earth, in the sense that it has clouds and rainfall onto a surface,” said Dr. Conor Nixon, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Together with ground-based observations, Webb is giving us precious new insights into Titan’s atmosphere, that we hope to be able to investigate much closer-up in the future with a possible ESA mission to visit the Saturn system.” The Webb data provided a key missing piece for our understanding of the chemical processes: a definitive detection of the methyl radical (CH 3), which forms when methane is broken apart.

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