The Cassini-Huygens space probe, which for nearly five years has been reporting from Saturn’s giant Moon Titan, has provided evidence that the weather patterns on Titan are similar to Earth’s but much slower. And that means longer summers, scientists say.
A report from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory describes how the lingering cloud formations will mean a “warm and wetter”autumn on the Moon. One of the Cassini team members, Sebastien Rodriguez of the University of Paris Diderot, described the findings in the JPL news release.
“Titan’s clouds don’t move with the seasons exactly as we expected,”said Rodriguez. “We see lots of clouds during the summer in the southern hemisphere, and this summer weather seems to last into the early fall. It looks like Indian summer on Earth, even if the mechanisms are radically different on Titan from those on Earth. Titan may then experience a warmer and wetter early autumn than forecasted by the models.”
More information on the ongoing Cassini-Huygens mission, and the approaching spring equinox on Titan, is available at ArsTechnica.