Pinging Saturn's Moon Titan

Dave on Earth (6:27 PM): Hi Rosaly, it's Dave Mosher from Discovery.com!

CassiniScientist (6:28 PM): Hi Dave, nice talking to you

Dave on Earth (6:28 PM): Thanks! So, I'm IMing you from Tucson, Arizona. Where's your present location in the universe?

CassiniScientist (6:28 PM): I'm in Pasadena, California, at the Jet Propulsion Lab

Dave on Earth (6:28 PM): Warm weather?

CassiniScientist (6:29 PM): Very nice today - in the 80s. I'm Brazilian, so I love warm weather

Dave on Earth (6:29 PM): Then you should come here - it's about 110 degrees. Nice n' toasty.

Dave on Earth (6:29 PM): Anywho, we're chatting today about the Cassini spacecraft now zooming around Saturn and its gang of moons - about 780 million miles away from us, correct?

CassiniScientist (6:31 PM): Something like that. Let's just say it's not in Kansas anymore

Dave on Earth (6:32 PM): That's one way to put it, I guess. By the way, where do you fit into Cassini's mission?

CassiniScientist (6:31 PM): I'm the Investigation Scientist for the RADAR instrument. This means that I represent the science team at JPL, but I'm also part of the science team.

CassiniScientist (6:31 PM): So my job involves scientific research, planning new observations, huddling with project managers and engineers, and with other teams.

Dave on Earth (6:32 PM): Sounds like you wear quite a few hats. What would you say is the best thing about your job - er, jobs?

CassiniScientist (6:34 PM): I love what I do. I'm an explorer at heart, so the most important thing for me is to be part of space exploration. I previously worked on the Galileo mission, and discovered 71 unknown volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io. Really, how many jobs in the world are that cool?

Dave on Earth (6:35 PM): Well, I can't claim to have found a set of car keys, let alone a volcano - that sounds like quite a thing to brag about!

CassiniScientist (6:36 PM): I may have found volcanoes, but I still I lose car keys sometimes! So don't fret

Dave on Earth (6:36 PM): Back to RADAR on Cassini - how does this instrument help you explore space?

CassiniScientist (6:36 PM): We are using RADAR to see the surface of Titan in detail for the first time. Each flyby brings us a new piece of real estate, never seen before in such incredible detail.

Dave on Earth (6:36 PM): You mentioned a couple interesting things - "Titan" and "flyby." What are these, and what's Cassini got to do with them?

CassiniScientist (6:38 PM): Right. Cassini is in orbit around Saturn, and Titan is Saturn's largest and strangest moon. We fly close to Titan's surface about once every few weeks and when we're close, we turn on a special mode of our RADAR instrument called synthetic aperture. This allows us to build images of the surface using pulses of radar.

Dave on Earth (6:39 PM): How close can Cassini get to Titan? Are we talking "I can see my house from here!"

CassiniScientist (6:41 PM): The altitude varies for each flyby, but during the RADAR sweeps it's usually around 630 mi -750 mi. So you'd have trouble seeing your home

Dave on Earth (6:41 PM): That's still pretty close. You said Titan is strange. What makes it stick out from the crowd?

CassiniScientist (6:42 PM): Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere, around 40% thicker than Earth's, in fact. It has an exotic chemistry, lots of hydrocarbons like methane.

Dave on Earth (6:42 PM): Probably wouldn't be a good idea to light a match on Titan.