Skip to main content

Home/ SciByte/ Group items tagged Dione

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Mars Base

Saturn's Icy Moon Dione Has Oxygen Atmosphere | Saturn Pictures | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/n-dione-oxygen-atmosphere.html

scibyte36 Saturn Dione

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • NASA spacecraft circling Saturn has discovered a wispy oxygen atmosphere on the ringed planet's icy moon Dione
  • is 5 trillion times less dense than the air at Earth's surface
  • detected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • equivalent to conditions 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth
  • one oxygen ion for every 2,550 cubic feet (90,000 cubic meters
  • still enough to qualify as an atmosphere
  • announced Friday (March 2).
  • Dione, in addition to Saturn's rings and the moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules
  • shows that molecular oxygen is actually common in the Saturn system and reinforces that it can come from a process that doesn't involve life
  • Dione is one of Saturn's smaller moons
  • 698 miles (1,123 km) wide
  • orbits Saturn once every 2.7 days
  • distance of about 234,000 miles (377,400 km)
  • roughly the same as that between Earth and its moon
  • The oxygen on Dione may potentially be created by solar photons or high-energy particles that bombard the Saturn moon's ice-covered surface, kicking up oxygen ions in the process, Tokar explained.  Another idea suggests that geologic processes on Dione could feed the moon's atmosphere, researchers added.
  • atmosphere on Saturn's moon Rhea — one similar to that of Dione — was also detected in 2010
  • Dione was discovered in 1684 by astronomer Giovanni Cassini
  • named after the Greek goddess Dione, who the ancient Greek poet Homer described as the mother of the goddess Aphrodite
  • launched the Cassini mission in 1997 and it has been orbiting Saturn since its arrival at the ringed planet in 2004
  • joint effort by NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Italy, has been extended several times, most recently until 2017
Mars Base

Oxygen discovered at Saturn's moon Dione - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...-oxygen-saturn-moon-dione.html

scibyte36 Saturn Dione

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Dione, one of Saturn’s icy moons, has a weak exosphere which includes molecules of oxygen, according to new findings from the Cassini-Huygens mission
  • international mission made the discovery using combined data from one of Cassini’s instruments, called CAPS (Cassini Plasma Spectrometer
  • Dione joins Rhea and the main rings in Saturn's system in having an oxygen rich exosphere
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • It now looks like oxygen production is a universal process wherever an icy moon is bathed in a strong trapped radiation and plasma environment
  • Cassini flew by Dione on 7 April 2010
  • During that flyby
  • molecular oxygen ions near the moon's icy surface
  • used the measurements to estimate the density of the molecular oxygen ions to be in the range of 0.01 to 0.09 ions per cubic centimetre
  • molecular oxygen ions are produced when neutral molecules are ionized; the measurements confirm that a neutral exosphere surrounds Dione.
  • Dione's exosphere is very thin - compared to Earth's atmosphere the density is about a million billionth. The exciting thing is that there is oxygen
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page