presented the findings to Gunnison County commissioners and airport officials in November. In a “true visitation estimate” study of the Gunnison Crested Butte Regional Airport (GUC) during 2019/2020, an independent research firm has determined flight-based Gunnison County visitation has not kept pace with many other comparable areas, and suggested the county and GUC consider new approaches to capture more of a growing leisure travel market.Īir service consultant Jeffrey Hartz with Mead & Hunt, Inc. Despite increases in Local Marketing District funds and a common perception that more visitors have been coming to the Gunnison Valley in recent years, a new study shows that air-based travel has remained relatively flat for the past decade as comparable areas like Sun Valley, Idaho and Jackson Hole, Wyoming have shown sustained growth. The composite infrared spectrometer team is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., where the instrument was built.įor more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit and. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Jennings et al., Astrophysical Journal Letters, 816, L17, 2016. These Titan surface temperature maps are a visualization of measurements that appeared in publication as: D. This is a much smaller contrast than exists between Earth's warmest and coldest temperatures, which can vary by more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit, or more than 100 degrees Celsius. The latitude on Titan where the sun is directly overhead (the subsolar latitude) is indicated by a yellow star.Īlthough it moves in latitude, the maximum measured temperature on Titan remains around -292 degrees Fahrenheit (-179.6 degrees Celsius, 93.6 Kelvin), with a minimum temperature at the winter pole only 6 degrees Fahrenheit (3.5 degrees Celsius or Kelvin) colder. The small globe in the upper right corner shows the view of Titan as seen from the direction of the sun. The latitude banding has been smoothed to more clearly show the how Titan's peak temperature moves from 19 degrees south to 16 degrees north latitude between 20.
The animation above shows a simplified model of the varying temperature data at yearly intervals. The moon's dense, hazy envelope adds noise to the difficult measurement. While the overall trend in the temperature shift is clearly evident in these maps, there is narrow banding in several places that is an artifact of making the observations through Titan's atmosphere. Temperatures subsequently cooled in the south and rose in the north, as southern winter approached. Shortly after the 2009 equinox, in 2010, temperatures were symmetrical across the northern and southern hemispheres, mimicking the distribution observed by Voyager 1 in 1980 (one Titan year earlier). When Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, Titan's southern hemisphere was in late summer and was therefore the warmest region. As on Earth, the amount of sunlight received at each latitude varies as the sun's illumination moves northward or southward over the course of the 30-year-long Saturnian year. Titan's surface temperature changes slowly over the course of the Saturn system's long seasons, which each last seven and a half years. Black regions in the maps are areas for which there was no data. Temperatures have been averaged around the globe from east to west (longitudinally) to emphasize the seasonal variation across latitudes (from north to south). The maps show thermal infrared radiation (heat) coming from Titan's surface at a wavelength of 19 microns, a spectral window at which the moon's otherwise opaque atmosphere is mostly transparent.