SATURNS TITAN MOON

NASA's Cassini has been a busy spacecraft since it arrived

at Saturn in 2004. Some of its key discoveries include seeing
active water ice plumes at the moon Enceladus, watching strange
storms develop in Saturn's atmosphere and (along with the
Europe-led lander Huygens) discovering that the enigmatic moon
Titan has lakes and seas just like Earth but composed of
methane and ethane, not water. However, all good things must
come to an end and the mission is in its last year of operations.
Low on fuel, it will make two daring orbital changes to creep
closer to Saturn's rings and the planet before plunging into the
planet itself. Here are just a handful of things left on Cassini's
"to-do" list.Saturn's "F" ring is a scientist's wonderland. The ring
is constantly tugged by the moons Pandora and Prometheus, and
perhaps there are smaller moonlets embedded in the ring as well.
This means there's a lot of weird structures embedded inside that
can rapidly change, sometimes within hours. Starting on Nov.
30, Cassini will get a better look at the F ring when it starts 20
passes just outside of the main rings. Cassini will get as close as
4,850 miles (7,800 kilometers) of the ring's center."
 During the F ring orbits we expect incredible views of the
rings, along with the small moons and other structures
embedded in them, as we've never seen them before," said
Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in California, in a statement. "The last
time we got this close to the rings was during arrival at Saturn
in 2004, and we saw only their backlit side. Now we have
dozens of opportunities to examine their structure at
extremely high resolution on both sides."We've been spoiled
with close flybys of the soupy moon Titan during Cassini's
mission. This composite image from November 2015 peers
below the haze (in infrared wavelengths) to the hydrocarbon
pools below. Cassini will make one last pass of this moon in
April 2017 to permanently change its orbit. Once this
happens, Cassini will fly through the narrow gap between the
rings and Saturn.

This zone is only 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) wide and

has never been looked at in detail before, providing an
unprecedented opportunity to learn more about the rings and
the planet. "While it will be sad to say goodbye, Cassini's final
act is like getting a whole new mission in its own right," said
Spilker. "The scientific value of the F ring and Grand Finale
orbits is so compelling that you could imagine an entire
mission to Saturn designed around what we're about to
do."There was a neat period in 1979, 1980 and 1981 when
three missions in a row flew by Saturn: Pioneer 11, Voyager
1 and Voyager 2. Then we had to wait until 2004 for Cassini
to show up and start doing its work.
 So we've been spoiled by a lot of pictures and data, but
some fundamental mysteries remain. How long is a Saturn
day? How old are the rings? The final phase of Cassini aims
to answer those questions.

RELATED: Cassini Finds Saturn's Rings Are Weirdly Thin

During this phase, Europlanet states, "scientists hope to gain

new insights into Saturn's interior structure, the precise length
of a Saturn day, and the total mass of the rings which may
finally help settle the question of their age. The spacecraft will
also directly analyze dust-sized particles in the main rings and
sample the outer reaches of Saturn's atmosphere both first-
time measurements for the mission."

1.The Moons Mysterious Magnetic

Field
 2.The Six-Tailed Asteroid

Asteroid P/2013 P5 is a unique find with its six

spouting jets, as all other pieces of cosmic debris are
quite content with considerably fewer. It blasts material
indiscriminately into space like a cosmic lawn sprinkler
However, astronomers do know that P5 is a leftover
chunk from a previous impact. The tails most likely
contain zero ice content, since frozen water is unlikely to
be found in an object thats been previously exploded to
800 degrees Celsius (1,500 F).