For the first time ever, we observed the circulation cell direction reverse over the south pole around the time of the 2009 southern autumnal equinox.
As leaves fall and winter approaches in Earth's Northern Hemisphere, a change of seasons is also rapidly becoming noticeable in the southern hemisphere of Saturn's giant moon, Titan. Thanks to NASA's Cassini spacecraft which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, scientists have been able to observe for the first time ever the seasonal atmospheric circulation direction change on Titan - an event which only happens once every 15 years and is never observable from Earth. Titan, while technically only a moon, is bigger than the planet Mercury, and is often considered a planet in its own right. It is the only known moon to have a significant atmosphere and is one of only four terrestrial atmospheres in our Solar System (the other three being Earth, Venus, and Mars). As Titan's rotation axis is tilted by a similar amount to that of the Earth, it experiences seasons in a similar way, but at a much more relaxed pace as Saturn takes 29. Earth years to orbit the Sun. Nick Teanby of the University of Bristol and colleagues used infrared spectra measured by Cassini's Composite InfraRed Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument to determine atmospheric temperature and global distributions of chemical tracers.
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