Winds Measured On Saturn's Moon Titan To Help Robot Lander On
top the windswept summit of a Hawaiian volcano, a NASA
instrument attached to the Japanese Subaru telescope measured
distant winds raging on a strange world - Titan, the giant moon
of Saturn - to help the robotic Huygens probe as it descends
through Titan's murky atmosphere next January. When combined
with previous observations, new research with the Heterodyne
Instrument for Planetary Wind And Composition (HIPWAC) joined to
the large aperture of the Subaru telescope supports the model
that Titan has currents or jet streams at high latitudes racing
through its upper atmosphere (stratosphere) at speeds of
approximately 756 km/hour (470 miles/hr.). The new observations
reveal that the wind travels in the same direction as Titan's
rotation, and that the stratospheric winds are milder (about 425
km/hr. Or 264 miles/hr.) Near the equatorial regions, as the jet
stream model predicts. HIPWAC was designed and built at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in