Outer Solar System

It’s reasonable to call the two Voyager spacecraft our first interstellar probes, in the sense that they are approaching the heliopause and are still transmitting data. Long before controllers shut them down — which should occur somewhere in the 2020s — Voyager 1 will have left the Solar System and we’ll have data on what [...]

Yesterday’s look at a major river on Titan took on a decidedly science fictional cast, but then Titan has always encouraged writers to speculate. Asimov’s “First Law” (1956) tackles a storm on Titan as a way of dealing with the Three Laws of Robotics. Arthur C. Clarke filled Titan with a large human colony in [...]

Even as New Horizons continues to push toward Pluto, now just past the halfway point between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, we’re continuing to get excellent data from the much closer Cassini spacecraft around Saturn. Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) is probing the circulation and chemistry of Titan’s atmosphere, tracking how gases like benzene [...]

One of the challenges of running a site like Centauri Dreams is that deep space news accumulates so swiftly that it’s easy to focus on one issue while another timely story slips away. I don’t want to get too far past the European Planetary Science Congress, which ended in Madrid on September 28, without mentioning [...]