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Saturn after Cassini Conference

The scientific results from the Cassini-Huygens mission have been revolutionising our understanding of the Solar System. Two new books to be published about the results have each had international book symposiums.

The symposium for the Saturn-based book was organised by members of Imperial College with the support of Imperial Consultants.

Since 2004 the Cassini-Huygens mission has been sending data back daily to be studied by over 250 scientists worldwide.

The analysis of this data has led to many exciting discoveries about the Saturnian system. Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has been studied intensely. This is due to the dense atmosphere it possesses and the resemblance it may have to Earth many billions of years ago.

In addition, some of the smaller moons have shown surprising features. One of the inner moons, Enceladus, has a surface covered in water ice. Unusually for such a small moon it also has an atmosphere. Professor Michele Dougherty led scientists analysing the magnetic field data sent back from Enceladus.

The Royal Society awarded Professor Dougherty the 2008 Hughes Medal for her work. Her “innovative use of magnetic field data” has transformed our understanding of the Solar System’s planetary moons.

She is also one of the editors of the two books being published by Springer on the results from the Cassini-Huygens mission, and the organiser of the Imperial book symposium.

One book will focus on Titan, whilst the other will focus on the rest of the Saturnian system. The symposiums for each book were an opportunity for the scientists involved to discuss what should be contained.

Over 150 delegates attended the week-long event held at Imperial College. Invited speakers and daily poster sessions gave an overview of the science being done.

It wasn’t just the same old research being discussed either – plenty of new research was unveiled at the conference. During the conference one delegate's paper about the existence of liquid ethane lakes on Titan was published in Nature.

Organisation of such a large conference was new to Michele, and the support provided by Imperial Consultants proved invaluable. We handled aspects including the event management, poster design, website creation and registration process.

“The conference format’s been really popular” says Michele “ and it’s great for us to see what other researchers are doing – often our knowledge about Saturn is confined to our own research area and we don’t know what’s going on outside that, even if it is on the same planet!”

(image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)