Cloudspotting at Saturn and Titan: Learning About Weather from a Billion Miles Away

The weather is a daily reminder of the changes in our environment, and can inspire the search for a deeper understanding of our physical world. From the local weekly weather forecast, to knowledge of regional and seasonal conditions, to predicting the global climate response of our atmosphere in the coming decades due to significant anthropogenic changes, there are intriguing challenges in understanding our atmosphere. Since the Cassini mission to the Saturn system, it has become possible to evaluate the physics and models that we use to address these challenges on Earth by applying our understanding to exotic environments with fascinating meteorology. Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is the one place in the Solar System beyond our planet where fluids on a rocky surface interact with dense atmosphere, forming clouds, fog and rain, in a strangely familiar hydrological cycle that operates at 290 degrees below zero. In these frigid conditions, the role of water is played by methane, the dominant component of natural gas. I'll describe how measurements from telescopes on Earth, the Cassini spacecraft that is still orbiting the Saturn system, and the Huygens probe that landed on surface of Titan all inform our knowledge of weather in the Saturn system.

Speaker: Máté Ádámkovics, UC Berkeley

Room 100