Saturn News

June 26, 2025

Top Headlines

Why Are Some Rocks on the Moon Highly Magnetic?

May 23, 2025 — Scientists may have solved the mystery of why the moon shows ancient signs of magnetism although it has no magnetic field today. An impact, such as from a large asteroid, could have generated a cloud of ionized particles that briefly enveloped the ...

Saturn's Moon: Mysterious Wobbling Atmosphere Like a Gyroscope

May 22, 2025 — The puzzling behavior of Titan's atmosphere has been revealed. The team has shown that the thick, hazy atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon doesn't spin in line with its surface, but instead wobbles like a gyroscope, shifting with the ...

Innovative Approaches Advance Search for Ice on the Moon

Apr. 23, 2025 — Scientists and space explorers have been on the hunt to determine where and how much ice is present on the Moon. Water ice would be an important resource at a future lunar base, as it could be used to support humans or be broken down to hydrogen and ...

Scientists Probe the Mystery of Titan's Missing Deltas

Apr. 18, 2025 — New research finds that despite large rivers and seas of liquid methane, Saturn's moon Titan seems mostly devoid of river deltas, raising new questions about the surface dynamics on this alien ...

Solar Cells Made of Moon Dust Could Power Future Space Exploration

Apr. 3, 2025 — The same dirt that clings to astronauts' boots may one day keep their lights on. Researchers created solar cells made out of simulated Moon dust. The cells convert sunlight into energy efficiently, withstand radiation damage, and mitigate the need ...

Lunar Trailblazer Blasts Off to Map Water on the Moon

Feb. 28, 2025 — On Wednesday 26 February, a thermal imaging camera blasted off to the Moon as part of NASA's Lunar Trailblazer mission. This aims to map sources of water on the Moon to shed light on the lunar water cycle and to guide future robotic and human ...

Tidal Energy Measurements Help Scientists Understand Titan's Composition, Orbital History

Feb. 13, 2025 — Scientists are studying Saturn's moon Titan to assess its tidal dissipation rate, the energy lost as it orbits the ringed planet with its massive gravitational force. Understanding tidal dissipation ...

Euclid Discovers a Stunning Einstein Ring

Feb. 10, 2025 — Euclid, the European Space Agency's dark Universe detective, has made an astonishing discovery -- right in our cosmic ...

Alien Ocean Could Hide Signs of Life from Spacecraft

Feb. 6, 2025 — A new study focusing on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, shows that the physics of alien oceans could prevent evidence of deep-sea life from reaching places where we can detect ...

Straight Shot: Hubble Investigates Galaxy With Nine Rings

Feb. 4, 2025 — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a cosmic bullseye! The gargantuan galaxy LEDA 1313424 is rippling with nine star-filled rings after an 'arrow' -- a far smaller blue dwarf galaxy -- shot through its heart. Astronomers using Hubble ...

Exploring Mysteries of Asteroid Bennu

Jan. 29, 2025 — Scientists found that asteroid Bennu contained a set of salty mineral deposits that formed in an exact sequence when a brine evaporated, leaving clues about the type of water that flowed billions of years ...

Moon Is Not as 'Geologically Dead' as Previously Thought

Jan. 29, 2025 — Scientists developed advanced dating methods to track geological changes on the far side of the moon and found evidence of relatively recent ...

Latest Headlines

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What Lies Beneath: Using Rock Blasted from Craters to Probe the Martian Subsurface

May 15, 2025 — By analyzing how far material ejected from an impact crater flies, scientists can locate buried glaciers and other interesting subsurface ...

Saturn's Moon Titan Could Harbor Life, but Only a Tiny Amount, Study Finds

Apr. 7, 2025 — Despite its uniquely rich inventory of organic molecules, Saturn's largest moon, Titan, may be able to support only a minuscule amount of biomass, if life exists on the moon, according to a study ...

Follow the Water: Searching for a Lunar Oasis

Jan. 28, 2025 — As humankind imagines living off-planet -- on the moon, Mars and beyond -- the question of how to sustain life revolves around the physical necessities of oxygen, food and water. We know there is ...

How Titan Maintains Its Atmosphere

Jan. 27, 2025 — Scientists have performed laboratory experiments to better understand how Saturn's moon Titan can maintain its unique nitrogen-rich atmosphere. Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system ...

The Moon: A Chunk Ejected from Earth?

Jan. 16, 2025 — A research team has discovered another piece in the puzzle of the formation of the Moon and water on Earth. The prevailing theory was that the Moon was the result of a collision between the early ...

A 'Remelting' of Lunar Surface Adds a Wrinkle to Mystery of Moon's True Age

Dec. 18, 2024 — Scientists propose a 'remelting' of the Moon's surface 4.35 billion years ago due to the tidal pull of Earth causing widespread geological upheaval and intense ...

Heart of Jovian Moon's Volcanic Rage

Dec. 13, 2024 — A new study points to why, and how, Io became the most volcanic body in the solar ...

NASA's Hubble Celebrates Decade of Tracking Outer Planets

Dec. 10, 2024 — A NASA Hubble Space Telescope observation program called OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) obtains long-term baseline observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in order to understand ...

Uranus's Swaying Moons Will Help Spacecraft Seek out Hidden Oceans

Nov. 25, 2024 — A new computer model can be used to detect and measure interior oceans on the ice covered moons of Uranus. The model works by analyzing orbital wobbles that would be visible from a passing ...

Swirling Polar Vortices Likely Exist on the Sun

Nov. 11, 2024 — Like the Earth, the Sun likely has swirling polar vortices, according to new research. But unlike on Earth, the formation and evolution of these vortices are driven by magnetic ...

Saturn's Moon Titan Has Insulating Methane-Rich Crust Up to Six Miles Thick

Oct. 25, 2024 — A new study has revealed that methane gas may be trapped within the icy surface of Saturn's moon Titan, forming a distinct crust up to six miles thick, which warms the underlying ice shell and ...

Asteroid Ceres Is a Former Ocean World That Slowly Formed Into a Giant, Murky Icy Orb

Sep. 27, 2024 — A crater-rich dwarf planet named Ceres located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was long thought to be composed of a materials mixture not dominated by water ice. ...

Gigantic Asteroid Impact Shifted the Axis of Solar System's Biggest Moon

Sep. 3, 2024 — Around 4 billion years ago, an asteroid hit the Jupiter moon Ganymede. Now, a researcher realized that the Solar System's biggest moon's axis has shifted as a result of the impact, which ...

Hidden Magmatism Discovered at the Chang'e-6 Lunar Landing Site

Aug. 27, 2024 — Lunar igneous activities including intrusive and extrusive magmatism, and their products contain significant information about the lunar interior and its thermal state. Their distribution is ...

NASA's DART Impact Permanently Changed the Shape and Orbit of Asteroid Moon

Aug. 23, 2024 — A new study provides insights on the geophysics behind asteroid formation and ...

Scientists Pin Down the Origins of the Moon's Tenuous Atmosphere

Aug. 2, 2024 — Scientists say they have identified the main process that formed the moon's atmosphere and continues to sustain it today. The team reports that the lunar atmosphere is primarily a product of ...

Scientists Devise Method to Secure Earth's Biodiversity on the Moon

July 31, 2024 — New research led proposes a plan to safeguard Earth's imperiled biodiversity by cryogenically preserving biological material on the moon. The moon's permanently shadowed craters are cold ...

Life Signs Could Survive Near Surfaces of Enceladus and Europa

July 21, 2024 — Europa and Enceladus, icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, have evidence of oceans beneath their crusts. A NASA experiment suggests -- if these oceans support life -- signatures of that life ...

New Analysis of Cassini Data Yields Insights Into Titan's Seas

July 16, 2024 — A new study of radar experiment data from the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn has yielded fresh insights related to the makeup and activity of the liquid hydrocarbon seas near the north pole of ...

New Class of Mars Quakes Reveals Daily Meteorite Strikes

June 28, 2024 — An international team of researchers combine orbital imagery with seismological data from NASA's Mars InSight lander to derive a new impact rate for meteorite strikes on Mars. Seismology also ...

Shocked Quartz Reveals Evidence of Historical Cosmic Airburst

June 26, 2024 — Researchers continue to expand the case for the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. The idea proposes that a fragmented comet smashed into the Earth's atmosphere 12,800 years ago, causing a ...

Geologists Expect Chang'e-6 Lunar Surface Samples to Contain Volcanic Rock and Impact Ejecta

June 24, 2024 — On June 25, China's Chang'e-6 (CE-6) lunar probe is set to return to Earth, carrying the first surface samples collected from the farside of the Moon. In anticipation of this historic ...

Titan's Lakes May Be Shaped by Waves

June 19, 2024 — Geologists studied Titan's shorelines and showed through simulations that coastlines of the moon's methane- and ethane-filled seas have likely been shaped by waves. Until now, scientists ...

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Is Not the Same One Cassini Observed in 1600s

June 19, 2024 — Jupiter's iconic Great Red Spot has persisted for at least 190 years and is likely a different spot from the one observed by the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1665, a new study ...

In New Experiment, Scientists Record Earth's Radio Waves from the Moon

June 10, 2024 — Odysseus, a tenacious lander built by the company Intuitive Machines, almost didn't make it to the moon. But an experiment aboard the spacecraft managed to capture an image of Earth as it might ...

Glimpses of a Volcanic World: New Telescope Images of Jupiter's Moon Io Rival Those from Spacecraft

May 30, 2024 — Combining a new imaging instrument with the powerful adaptive optics capabilities of the Large Binocular Telescope, astronomers have captured a volcanic event on Jupiter's moon Io at a ...

New Technique Offers More Precise Maps of the Moon's Surface

May 29, 2024 — A new study may help redefine how scientists map the surface of the Moon, making the process more streamlined and precise than ever ...

Cosmic Rays Illuminate the Past

May 21, 2024 — Researchers have for the first time been able to pin down a prehistoric settlement of early farmers in northern Greece dating back more than 7,000 years to the year. For this they combined annual ...

How the Moon Turned Itself Inside out

Apr. 8, 2024 — Linking analyses of the moon's gravity field with models of its earliest evolution, scientists tell a story of the moon turning itself inside out after it solidified from a primordial magma ...

Signs of Life Would Be Detectable in Single Ice Grain Emitted from Extraterrestrial Moons

Mar. 22, 2024 — Could life be found in frozen sea spray from moons orbiting Saturn or Jupiter? New research finds that life can be detected in a single ice grain containing one bacterial cell or portions of a cell. ...