abstract
-
Someday, researchers hope to land a spacecraft on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. When they do, they need to know what, exactly, they’re landing in.
“We want our spacecraft to splash, not splat,” says Jason Barnes, an associate professor of physics at the University of Idaho.
He and his students work with researchers around the nation studying Titan through NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Barnes has been working with Cassini since the craft arrived in the Saturn system in 2004.
In March 2014, Barnes announced his most recent project has discovered evidence on Titan of a feature previously found only on Earth: waves.