Los Anageles Times - August 14, 2009
At last, the missing storm clouds on Saturn's moon Titan may have been found.
In the last decade, researchers have monitored clouds at both of Titan's poles, where large lakes of methane have been spotted by Earth-based observers and by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting the moon for the last three years. But the moon's clouds seemed inexplicably confined to those areas.
"We've seen a lot of clouds at the poles. But we'd never seen a major storm at the equator," said Michael Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech.
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In April 2008, Schaller was using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to track daily weather activity on Titan. One day, after weeks of frustration, she checked the data from the previous night and found that "Titan suddenly had the biggest clouds ever."
After that, Brown, Schaller and their colleagues began tracking the clouds with the giant Gemini telescope on Mauna Kea. Brown said the first cloud appeared in the tropics and rapidly spread around the moon.
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