Before I move into today's story on Titan, I want to mention that those of us who weren't able to attend the ongoing Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2010) can take heart in the fact that selected papers from the proceedings have been quickly published online. Conferences vary tremendously in the resources they make available during and after the event, but the ISSS organizers are obviously intent on wide distribution of these interesting talks. Let's hope those papers not yet included will find their way online in coming days. TZF's Pat Galea has posted a number of photos from day one of the event on Flickr, including this shot of JAXA's Osamu Mori delivering an early talk on the IKAROS mission. Project leader for IKAROS, this man is a solar sail pioneer. For those of you who've asked, the focus of ISSS 2010 is indeed near-term, although several longer-range papers will be presented. With our first operational solar sail only recently launched, this is a time to...

We learned in May that Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt (SEB) had disappeared, an event that still has skywatchers puzzled, though it's not without precedent. In fact, the SEB fades out every now and then, with recent fadings in 1989, 1993 and 2010, and we can expect an outburst of storms and vortices when the enigmatic belt returns, probably within the next two years, based on historical precedent. All of which puts the spotlight on Juno, a Jupiter mission intended for launch in August of 2011. Juno is all about the giant planet's core, its magnetic field, its auroras and the amount of water and ammonia in its atmosphere. Juno's Jovian Science Maybe Juno will tell us whether the disappearance of the South Equatorial Belt is the result of ammonia cirrus forming on top and hiding the belt from view. But there is much more to learn. Hydrogen gas deep in Jupiter's atmosphere is pressed into metallic hydrogen, a fluid that acts like an electrically conducting metal and is thought to be...

The idea of 'Nemesis,' a hypothetical dark companion to the Sun, won't quite go away, and it's possible that the WISE mission may help us either identify such an object or else demonstrate that it's not there. The idea is simple enough: Sol's companion would perturb the Oort Cloud in its orbit, causing comets to enter the inner Solar System, thus increasing the likelihood of an impact with the Earth. Throw in an apparent periodicity in extinction events first described back in 1984 and you have an intriguing case. But Adrian Melott (University of Kansas) and Richard Bambach (Smithsonian Institution) have reconsidered Nemesis in terms of extinction events in a new paper, one that looks at the timing of these incidents in light of the movements of Nemesis over time. They extend the original 26 million year extinction periodicity slightly, to 27 million years, and are careful to note that there is no consensus on the matter among paleontologists. But the real question they tackle is...

Centauri Dreams readers should know the name Stuart Atkinson, whose excellent Cumbrian Sky site I've linked to before. I don't have many occasions to reproduce poetry in these pages (although I did quote some lines from Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' in honor of Huygens' landing), but when I saw what Stuart had sent in to ESA's Rosetta team, I knew I had to highlight it here. Rosetta's encounter with the asteroid 21 Lutetia should bring out a bit of the poet in all of us, but Stuart nails what I felt: For all these years you were merely A smear of light through our telescopes On the clearest, coldest night; a hint Of a glint, just a few pixels wide On even your most perfectly-framed portraits. But now, now we see you! Swimming out of the dark - a great Stone shark, your star-tanned skin pitted And pocked, scarred after aeons of drifting Silently through the endless ocean of space. Here on Earth our faces lit up as we saw You clearly for the first time; eyes wide With wonder we traced the...