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Therefore, a judgment made about a person is less likely to be accurate if that judgment was made based on a 10 second sound bite.

It is completely disingenuous to say that Wright has "ranted and railed" against the US for 20 years. When watched in their proper context, the two speeches quoted so often on the news don't seem so outrageous.

In fact, I've only been able to find two speeches where he says anything even close to "anti-american." There are a great number of things he says in other sermons that I find myself agreeing with. And none of his sermons were the type of racist, anti-American "hate-speeches" that everyone loves to talk about.

With each flyby, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been building up the case that there are lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. But now we get the stunning news that the planet might have vast oceans of water and ammonia underneath its surface as well.

"We believe that about 62 miles beneath the ice and organic-rich surface is an internal ocean of liquid water mixed with ammonia..." 

Since Titan has an incredibly thick atmosphere, 1.5 times more dense than the Earth, it's possible that powerful winds are rocking the moon back and forth around its axis. It might be speeding the rotation up at one point in the year, and then slowing it back down again. But this would only be possible if there's an ocean underneath the surface that the entire crust floats on top of.

Many researchers believe the sun's poles are central to the ebb and flow of the solar cycle. Consider the following: When sunspots break up, their decaying magnetic fields are carried toward the poles by vast currents of plasma. This makes the poles a sort of "graveyard for sunspots." Old magnetic fields sink beneath the polar surface two hundred thousand kilometers deep, all the way down to the sun's inner magnetic dynamo. There, dynamo action amplifies the fields for use in future solar cycles

One big puzzle revealed by previous flybys is the temperature of the sun's poles. In the previous solar cycle, the magnetic north pole was about 80,000 degrees or 8% cooler than the south. Why should there be a difference? No one knows.

The current flyby may help solve the puzzle because it comes less than a year after a similar South Pole flyby in Feb. 2007. Mission scientists will be able to compare temperature measurements, north vs. south, with hardly any gap between them.

Both of Saturn's poles have surprising swirling hotspots that persist even through years of polar winter, a new study reveals.

The hotspots are localized areas in Saturn's gaseous atmosphere over its poles that are considerably warmer than the surrounding air — they're actually about as warm as the atmosphere at Saturn's equator

Scientists had thought that solar irradiation might be generating the hotspot in the southern hemisphere (currently in its summer phase, facing the sun), but the existence of a similar hotspot in the northern hemisphere, which has been plunged in wintry darkness for many years, suggests that isn't the case.

Instead, dynamic processes in Saturn's atmosphere may create the hotspots, the new findings, detailed in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Science, suggest, Fletcher says.

Air being sucked downward at the poles may cause the hotspots, while air moving upward in the atmosphere may be creating a cold "collar" around the hotspots. These air movements could be responsible for the raging hurricane-like storm imaged over the south pole in 2006.

As unusual as the hotspots themselves is the warm hexagonal ring of air surrounding the cold collar of the northern hemisphere hotspot. Stranger still is the lack of such a shape around the south pole.

"The mystery is... why on earth — or why on Saturn even — do we see a hexagon around the north pole, and not around the south pole?" Fletcher told SPACE.com.

Other missions have provided hints that Jupiter and Neptune have hotspots over their poles as well, suggesting they could be a feature of the atmospheres of all gaseous planets

New observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft indicate the rings of Saturn, once thought to have formed during the age of the dinosaurs, instead may have been created roughly 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system was still under construction.

led scientists (previously) to believe Saturn's rings were relatively youthful and likely created by a comet that shattered a large moon, perhaps 100 million years ago.  But ring features seen by instruments on Cassini -- which arrived at Saturn in 2004 -- indicate the rings were not formed by a single cataclysmic event. The ages of the different rings appear to vary significantly, and the ring material is continually being recycled

"The evidence is consistent with the picture that Saturn has had rings all through its history,"..."We have discovered that the rings probably were not created just yesterday in cosmic time, and in this scenario, it is not just luck that we are seeing planetary rings now," said Esposito. "They probably were always around but continually changing, and they will be around for many billions of years."

Scientists had previously believed rings as old as Saturn itself should be darker due to ongoing pollution by the "infall" of meteoric dust, leaving telltale spectral signatures, Esposito said. But the new Cassini observations indicate the churning mass of ice and rock within Saturn's gigantic ring system is likely much larger than previously estimated.  This helps explain why the rings overall appear relatively bright to ground-based telescopes and spacecraft.

clumps of icy boulders that are continually collecting and disbanding due to the competing processes of shattering and coming together again. The team tagged the clumpy moonlets with cat names like "Mittens" and "Fluffy" because they appear to come and go unexpectedly over time and have multiple lives, said Esposito.

Esposito stressed that Saturn's rings of the future won't be the same rings we see today, likening them to great cities around the world like San Francisco, Berlin or Beijing. "While the cities themselves will go on for centuries or millennia, the faces of people on the streets will always be changing due to continual birth and aging of new citizens."

Bright Clumpy Moonlets and Cold Saturn Mittens

the bowling ball-sized objects are designed to test control algorithms for spacecraft by carrying out a series of unmanned rendezvous and docking maneuvers.

The knobby protrusions in their profile are tanks of pressurized carbon dioxide [schematic], which the satellites use for propulsion within the ISS.

A member of the three-astronaut Expedition 14 crew snapped this view of the SPHERES satellites in action during a March 24, 2007 test.

The night side of Io is illuminated here by light reflected from Jupiter, which is out of the frame to the right.  Europa's night side is completely dark, in contrast to Io, because that side of Europa faces away from Jupiter

The picture was one of a handful of the Jupiter system that New Horizons took primarily for their artistic, rather than scientific value.

Enceladus geysers mask the length of Saturn's day

In a David and Goliath story of Saturnian proportions, the little moon Enceladus is weighing down giant Saturn's magnetic field so much that the field is rotating slower than the planet. This phenomenon makes it nearly impossible to measure the length of the Saturn day using techniques that work at the other giant planets.

"No one could have predicted that the little moon Enceladus would have such an influence on the radio technique that has been used for years to determine the length of the Saturn day"

Finding out the length of Saturn's day has been a challenge because the gaseous planet has no surface or fixed point to clock its rotation rate. Initially, the approach was to use periodic regular radio signals, as has been done for Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.

However, Saturn's radio period has turned out to be troubling in two ways:  It seems to be a pulsed signal rather than a rotating, lighthouse-like beam. Secondly, the period seems to be slowly changing over months to years.

Based on the new observations, scientists now think there are two possible reasons for the change in radio period. The first theory is that the geysers on Enceladus could be more active now than in Voyagers' time.