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Meet Carrie Anderson: Taking on Titan

Resource for Grades 9-12

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This media asset was adapted from "Taking on Titan: Meet Carrie Anderson" /NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

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Ever since she was a little girl, Carrie Anderson wanted to be an astronomer. Now she studies Saturn’s moon, Titan, using data transmitted to Earth from the Cassini space probe. Her research includes mapping Titan from the infrared zone of the electromagnetic spectrum and exploring the similarities between Titan’s current conditions and Earth’s early conditions.

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Background Essay

The Cassini spacecraft, with 12 sensors on board, was launched in 1997, and after a seven-year journey arrived at Saturn in 2004. The distance between Earth and Saturn isn’t constant. It changes based on the two planets’ relative positions in their orbits. The distance between the two ranges from about 800 million miles to a billion miles. In order to know the exact distance at a given time, you would need to know where each planet is in its orbit around the Sun.
While Cassini orbited Saturn, a companion probe - called the Huygens probe in honor of the astronomer who helped described Saturn’s rings and who discovered its moon Titan – dropped from orbit to the surface of Titan, sampling Titan’s atmosphere along the way. The probe was dropped from the Cassini orbiter and, after a two-and-a-half-hour descent, it landed on Saturn’s surface. During its descent and while on the surface, the probe transmitted hundreds of pictures back to Cassini, which, in turn, transmitted them to Earth. After 90 minutes, the Huygens probe went silent, as planned. Data from that probe showed that Titan has high concentrations of nitrogen and methane, elements that were abundant on Earth during its early history. That was in 2005. Today, the instruments on board Cassini - still orbiting Saturn - are streaming back an enormous amount of data, building on more than a decade of information about Saturn and its moon. Cassini’s instruments include imaging and mapping systems, analyzers, spectrometers, magnetometers, and other sensors.
Spectrometers measure properties of light at specific wavelengths corresponding to specific wave sizes specific energies. Because different materials absorb and reflect light of specific energies, spectrometers can help scientists infer the presence (or absence) of specific elements and molecules. Magnetometers sense magnetic fields, so scientists can use data from magnetometers to map magnetic properties of all kind of objects, including planets and moons.
One of Cassini’s sensors is the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). As noted above, a spectrometer senses light within a specific wavelength range. Like all spectrometers, CIRS splits light into different bands of color, like a prism, but CIRS is sensitive to light that’s beyond what’s visible to humans. CIRS is sensitive to invisible heat rays, or infrared light, rather than ordinary visible light. It measures the intensity of different infrared wavelengths –essentially heat rays - given off by Saturn and its moons. As CIRS searches for and maps heat, it’s also capable of determining an object’s composition. So, CIRS can tell not only how hot something is but also what it’s made of. Since a planet’s atmosphere (or, in a case of Titan, a moon’s atmosphere) is composed of layers upon layers of different gases at different temperatures, data from CIRS can help scientists figure out the atmosphere’s structure and composition.
Titan, one of Saturn’s numerous moons, is the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere. It’s mostly thick and foggy, made up of mostly nitrogen and methane (CH4), which were common on Earth during this planet’s early natural history. Titan’s climate, which includes wind effects and liquid rain (methane rain, not water) creates familiar Earth-like features like rivers, lakes, seas, shorelines, and dunes Titan has an internal, liquid water-ammonia ocean, and scientists believe Titan might also have water-based volcanoes, though scientists don’t yet understand where the water came from. These factors make Titan particularly intriguing as a close analog to a young planet Earth. Though twice the size of Earth and much, much colder – since it’s farther away from the Sun - Titan has an atmosphere with many of Earth’s chemical building blocks, has Earth-like seasonal changes, and shows evidence of some other similar features. Cassini’s instruments continue to expand what we know about Titan - and therefore about Earth.

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Discussion Questions

Before Viewing

Think of a childhood experience that sparked your interest in science. What were you doing? Who were you with? Was there a question you wondered about at the time that you didn’t get to explore that still interests you?
Your eyes can see visible light, but visible light makes up just a small band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Can you think of some sensors or instruments that can “see” or register other kinds of electromagnetic energy besides visible light?
Let’s do a thought experiment: What happens if we run Earth’s natural history clock backward to before there was life? Do you think Earth’s atmosphere was different than it is today? How did you arrive at your answer?

While Viewing

What got Carrie interested in math and science? Would you be interested in the kind of work Carrie does?
Why is Titan called a moon if it’s twice the size of Earth?
What characteristics of Titan are most interesting to you?

After Viewing

What does Carrie do at NASA? Could you imagine yourself doing similar work? Why or why not?
How does Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) use infrared light to study Titan?
How can studying Titan help us better understand Earth?
Bonus question: Astrobiology is the study of the origin, development, and future of life in the universe. Why would astrobiologists be interested in Titan?

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Transcript

Carrie Anderson: I built my first AM radio with my dad full-on, really sodering and building. I built, you know, missile rockets, and we launched those. And we had telescopes. And he was the first to show me Mars. And I slowly got into the space program that way. I knew in high school that I wanted to be an astronomer.

My name's Carrie Anderson and I'm a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and I'm a team member on Cassini CIRS. CIRS is called the composite infrared spectrometer, and it's one of the twelve instruments on board the Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn. What CIRS does is it goes beyond the human visible spectrum part, that we see with our eyes, into the thermal infrared, what I'll call it. So imagine sitting in front of fire, and you are not looking at it, but you're feeling the fire, the heat from the fire. CIRS sees that heat and records it. And then we can tell what is going on: there's this molecule, this molecule, this type of maybe particulate, a cloud. to try to figure out "Ok, what could that be?" And that's what we're doing to to find out the types of clouds that we see with CIRS.

But if you just kind of look at Titan from a big picture point of view, first of all it's a moon, and it orbits Saturn. It's Saturn’s largest moon. And it's the second largest moon in our solar system, next to Jupiter's Ganymede. But what's really intriguing about Titan is that it is the only moon in our solar system with a thick, substantial planet-like atmosphere. On Earth, in our troposphere, you know, when you look up and you see clouds those are all made of liquid water, ice crystals or a combination of the two. Well, Titan doesn't have that. It has methane instead. So you'd see all this methane rain, methane drizzle, methane clouds, all that.

There's a lot of early Earth scientists out there who want to learn about, you know, life "Is there life?" You can go to Titan as one possibility, because it can be representative of what the early Earth was like before we were here. It's a completely different environment than Earth, but it has a lot of similarities at the same time.

It's a very dynamic world. In studying it, you can do any kind of photochemistry, different chemistry, different physics. I was always interested in math and science, but my dad, I think, was a key role. I enjoyed it. I wanted to keep doing it and learning, and I'm here. Dream come true!