Oxygen on Saturn

The Cassini spacecraft has captured molecular oxygen ions around Dione, an icy moon of Saturn, confirming the presence of a very thin atmosphere.

The oxygen ions are very rare (one for every 11 cubic centimetres), showing that Dione has an extremely thin neutral atmosphere.

The detection of this thin atmosphere, known as the exosphere, is described in a recent issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"We now know that Dione, like the rings of Saturn and its moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules," said Robert Tokar, a member of the Cassini mission at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Several solid bodies in the solar system, including Earth, Venus, Mars, Saturn, the moon, etc, have atmospheres. However, tend to be denser than what has been found around Dione.

Cassini scientists detected an exosphere around the moon Rhea of ??Saturn in 2010, very similar to Dione. The density of oxygen on the surface of Dione and Rhea is about 5 billion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere.

Scientists believe that Dione, its small size, could have an atmosphere. The new discovery makes this small satellite into an object of study much more interesting.

The Cassini probe, launched in 1997, is a mission involving the NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency which aims to study climate change on Saturn and its moons.

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Posted by Fouad Ashraf on Mar 30 2012. Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry