Saturno ya tiene 60 lunas:
NASA/JPL: Scientists have recently discovered that the planet Saturn is turning 60 — not years, but moons.
“We detected the 60th moon orbiting Saturn using the Cassini spacecraft’s powerful wide-angle camera,” said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team scientist from Queen Mary, University of London. “I was looking at images of the region near the Saturnian moons Methone and Pallene and something caught my eye.”
The newly discovered moon first appeared as a very faint dot in a series of images Cassini took of the Saturnian ring system on May 30 of this year. After the initial detection, Murray and fellow Cassini imaging scientists played interplanetary detective, searching for clues of the new moon in the voluminous library of Cassini images to date.
Y Caronte, la distante y fría luna de Plutón, podría tener débiles criovolcanes emitiendo partículas de hielo de agua y amoníaco, que actúa como anticongelante. La fuente de calor podrían ser las partículas radioactivas atrapadas en el núcleo bajo la gruesa corteza de hielo.
Space.com: Slushy geysers on Pluto’s moon Charon apparently coat the tiny world in ice crystals, making it something like the outer solar system’s equivalent of an ice machine.
A very, very slow ice machine.
Water is likely trickling out at a glacial pace, researchers say, repaving Charon in a thin layer of 1-millimeter deep ice every 100,000 years.
The finding, announced today and detailed in the July 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal, hints at water ice inside Charon and has implications for other Kuiper Belt Objects-a class of relatively small, rocky bodies located beyond the orbit of Neptune.
En cuanto a la tormenta de Marte, ha remitido ligeramente en el último día, pero sigue en tau +4.6 (cuando al principio del primer invierno un tau de 2 se consideraba fatal). De momento las temperaturas del verano y la fuerza del viento está permitiendo ir tirando, ahorrando toda la energía posible. La tormenta es tan intensa que, incluso en la débil atmósfera de Marte, se ha podido observar cómo las pequeñas dunas se movían con una diferencia de dos días bajo los rovers.
