Caltech geology graduate student Katie Stack says her Caltech experience has provided her with the best of both worlds. Literally.

As one of five Caltech graduate students currently staffing the Mars Science Laboratory mission, Stack is simultaneously exploring the geologic pasts of both Mars and Earth. She and her student colleagues apply their knowledge of Earth's history and environment—gleaned from Caltech classes and field sites across the globe—to the analysis of Curiosity's discoveries as well as the hunt for evidence of past life on the Red Planet.

"Mars exploration is that perfect combination of understanding what is close to home and far afield," says Stack, who studies sedimentology and stratigraphy in the lab of John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist and Caltech's Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology.

"The mission is providing a different perspective for seeing the world . . . as well as for seeing myself," she adds. "As a graduate student, you often struggle with your place in your academic community, and taking part in the mission is one of the ways that we are just thrown into the mix. We are working on the same level as a bunch of senior scientists, who have a lot of experience, and yet they are asking us questions—seeking our expertise. That's an experience you don't often get to have."

Caltech's graduate student participants on the MSL—who include Stack, Kirsten Siebach, Lauren Edgar, Jeff Marlow, and Hayden Miller, all from the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences—represent the largest contingent of students from any one institution in a mission that has more than 400 participating scientists. Caltech's strong student presence is aided in large part by the leadership role that faculty are playing in the mission as well as the Institute's close proximity to mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA.

Caltech's graduate students are among the mission personnel responsible for sequencing the scientific plan and programming the rover each day, as well as for documenting the scientific discussion and decisions at each step of the mission. As the mission's blogger, Marlow also helps share the science team's work with the public.

"The graduate students are the heart of the mission," Grotzinger says. "They are the keepers of the plan and are able to efficiently operate the technology to run the rover every day, especially when senior scientists are unable to do so."

Making the science plans for the rover, says graduate student Kirsten Siebach, is "as close as I get to driving the rover. I can help program it to take pictures, analyze samples, and shoot the ChemCam laser."

"It's always fun when something that I helped command the rover to do, like take a picture, ends up making the news," she adds. "I helped command it to take one such picture of the Hottah outcrop that showed evidence of an ancient streambed."

In addition to staffing operations for the mission, Caltech's students are also key contributors to the scientific analysis of the data and help make decisions about where Curiosity goes.

Before Curiosity landed, for instance, Stack and Lauren Edgar, helped compile a geologic map of the Gale Crater landing ellipse, using orbital images to identify the geologic diversity and relationships among rocks. Their work has continued to serve as a "road map" for the rover's research. Meanwhile, Siebach has been exploring the history of water on Mars, looking at the geomorphology of channel structures and fractures on the planet.

"We really have grown up in the golden age of Mars exploration," Edgar says, noting that while at Caltech, she's had the opportunity to contribute to three Mars rover missions—Spirit, Opportunity, and now Curiosity. "They just keep getting better and better."

In addition to the graduate students, several undergraduate students have taken part in the mission, participating through Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program. This past summer, a student working with Bethany Ehlmann, an assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech and an MSL science team member, helped to characterize and classify hundreds of Earth rock samples for potential comparison with Mars specimens that will be analyzed by the ChemCam instrument. Meanwhile, over the past two summers, Solomon Chang, a Caltech sophomore studying computer science, worked with JPL engineers to model Curiosity's mobility to ensure that it would actually move on Mars as it had been programmed to do.

Those summer projects have ended, but for the Caltech grad students on the MSL team, the work continues. Indeed, says Grotzinger, because many of the mission's scientists will be leaving Pasadena to return to their home institutions during the coming months, the grad students will be called upon to fill additional roles in the rover's daily operation and science.

"One of the great things about working on a mission as a student is that science is a fairly merit-driven process," says Ehlmann, who participated in Mars exploration missions as both an undergraduate and graduate student. "So if you have a good idea and you are there, you can contribute to deciding what measurements to make, can develop hypothesis about what's going on. It's a very inspiring and empowering experience."

The Jet Propulsion Lab's Cassini spacecraft roared toward Saturn in a spectacular nighttime launch on October 15, 1997. After two gravity assists from Venus and one each from Earth and Jupiter, the school-bus-sized orbiter arrived at Saturn on June 30, 2004 Pasadena time, putting itself on a wildly looping path designed to give its Earthbound handlers repeated close-up looks at Saturn's rings, all of Saturn's big moons, a good few of the small ones—and, of course, Saturn itself. Saturn and its retinue have not disappointed; new wonders have been revealed with every orbit.

Cassini carried a second spacecraft along for the ride—a probe named Huygens, built by the European Space Agency and designed to land on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Titan could have been a planet itself, if it hadn't grown up in the wrong neighborhood. Titan is bigger than Mercury (but smaller than Mars) and has an atmosphere that's four times denser at the surface than Earth's is at sea level. The surface, however, had never been seen  before—or at least not clearly. There's so much methane in Titan's atmosphere that the entire moon is wrapped in an impenetrable, orange pall of photochemical smog.

Cassini dropped off its hitchhiker six months after arriving, and on January 14, 2005, Huygens took a two-hour, 28-minute parachute ride through Titan's atmosphere, smelling, tasting, and feeling its winds all the way down. At an altitude of about 40 kilometers, the hydrocarbon haze became transparent, revealing a vista much like the mountain ranges and dry lakes of the Mojave Desert. But because of Titan's average surface temperature of 95 kelvins (nearly –290° F) the gullies on these mountainsides had been carved by methane rain; the mountains themselves proved to be made of water ice frozen as hard as any rock on Earth.

Hyugens made a soft landing on material with the consistency of wet sand and was still broadcasting 72 minutes later when Cassini dropped below Titan's horizon and radio contact was lost. The pictures Huygens beamed back showed that it had come to rest on a sepia-tinted plain strewn with cantaloupe-sized cobblestones of ice that had clearly been rounded by a flowing liquid. It didn't take long to identify this fluid as methane, since Huygens's mass spectrometer detected a puff of the stuff vaporized from the greasy mudflat by the lander's body heat.

Cassini's radar mapper has since confirmed what earlier observations had suggested—that lakes of liquid methane and ethane exist, primarily in Titan's northern hemisphere. One, near the north pole, is the size of Lake Superior. Titan has taken this low-temperature parody of Earth, where methane is water and ice is rock, even further. Cassini's radar has spotted areas where there may be "cryovolcanoes" that ooze slush instead of lava.

Titan, big as it is, is far too small to have retained the warmth that volcanoes—even of ice—demand. However, Cassini found that it flexes like a stress ball in the grip of Saturn's gravity, which induces a 10-meter-tall "solid tide" in Titan's crust. This periodic deformation not only generates heat, but implies the presence of liquid water under the ice. A Titan made of solid rock could only bulge by about a meter, but a liquid would be more susceptible to Saturn's pull. "We have long suspected that Titan, like Jupiter's moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, has a subsurface ocean," says David Stevenson, Caltech's Goldberger Professor of Planetary Science. "These results show that this is very likely the case."

Titan isn't the only satellite of Saturn to join the subsurface saltwater society. The biggest surprise of the Cassini mission has come from Enceladus, a small, undistinguished moon that turns out to be spewing curtains of icy mist from the vicinity of its south pole. These geysers issue from fissures called tiger stripes—dark parallel gashes on Enceladus's otherwise bright surface. These intriguing stripes were discovered in May 2005, and the trajectory of Cassini's next flyby in July was altered to take a closer look. Cassini spotted the geysers on its way in, shortly before whizzing through them at an altitude of about 170 kilometers. A thermal map of the surface below linked the plumes to hot spots with temperatures of some 145 K—on a moon whose average surface temperature does not exceed 70 K. (See "A Nice Place to Visit?" in E&S No. 1, 2006.)

Life is found wherever liquid water exists on Earth. Could this hold for the outer solar system as well? Perhaps, says Professor of Planetary Science Andrew Ingersoll. "The idea of a 'habitable zone' has existed for a hundred years. All the water is frozen out on Mars, and it's all vaporized on Venus. Earth is just right—we have oceans, and we have life. But now, the habitable zone might also include an archipelago of these isolated moons."

Enceladus probably gets its heat by flexing, like Titan, Ingersoll says. "But this would dissipate orbital energy, and eventually Enceladus wouldn't be where it is any more. And neither would the other nearby moons, because they all influence each other." This could mean that the geysering is a relatively recent phenomenon, says Ingersoll. "Or is it cyclic, and we just got lucky enough to see it?"

Getting lucky may be putting it mildly. "You have to get the energy from somewhere," Stevenson observes. The proximate source, he says, could be a moon named Dione, with which Enceladus is in an orbital resonance. Enceladus makes two trips around Saturn for every one that Dione makes, and each time Enceladus catches up, Dione gives it a gravitational tug. Like a child being pushed ever higher on a swing, these gravity assists could nudge Enceladus into an increasingly eccentric orbit, Stevenson says. Eventually enough orbital energy might accumulate to trigger the geysers, which would then erupt for a while as Enceladus's orbit became more circular again. "This cycle might well take a million years or more," Stevenson says. "But Io, Jupiter's volcanic moon, is also overly active. And now you start to get scared, because this means you're looking at a very special time for both of them." If the odds of this coincidence are 1 in 10, it's not so bad; but if they work out to 1 in 100, it's time to find another theory.

Saturn's rings have also held surprises. Cassini arrived just after the northern hemisphere's winter solstice, when the rings were at their maximum tilt relative to the sun. This allowed the spacecraft to measure the sunlight passing through the rings, revealing them to be incredibly thin—a mere 10 to 20 meters thick, on average. During Saturn's equinox in August 2009, Cassini got a never-before-seen view of the rings aimed edge-on to the sun. As the light swept across them, giant shadows were cast by anything sticking up from the surface. Suddenly, towering waves of ice as much as four kilometers tall were thrown into sharp relief. They proved to be disturbances set off by the passage of the nearby moon Daphnis, whose orbit is slightly tilted relative to the ring plane. (Many more discoveries are described in "Cassini's Ringside Seat" in the Spring 2010 issue of E&S.)

And what of Saturn itself? Unlike Jupiter's psychedelic swirls of candy-cane colors bedecked with semipermanent storms such as the Great Red Spot, the bands in Saturn's atmosphere are muted shades of butterscotch. Not that there's nothing going on down there—Cassini has witnessed 10 thunderstorms in its eight-plus years over Saturn, all in the summer skies of the southern hemisphere. But on December 5, 2010, Cassini caught a storm 500 times the size of the others—in the northern hemisphere. The spacecraft heard the storm before it saw it, says Ingersoll. "So everything is very quiet, and then this giant thunderstorm goes off. We were getting copious noise on the radio receiver, and then we see this." What showed up as a tiny white spot in a picture shot that day grew to the diameter of Earth in three weeks, spawning a trail of white clouds that wrapped all the way around the planet. Such storms have been seen once every 30-odd years since 1876. They usually appear late in the northern hemisphere's summer, but this one arrived 10 years early at the beginning of spring.

"Saturn is normally very bland," Ingersoll says, "which makes this giant storm just weird. It's just crying out to be explained." Like thunderstorms on Earth, these storms are driven by convection, as air masses of different temperatures redistribute their heat. But rather than supporting a bunch of small storms all the time, Saturn stores up these heat differences until it unleashes a doozy. In some ways, Ingersoll says, Saturn behaves less like a terrestrial weather system and more like a volcano, in which the pressure builds up for many years before an eruption. Volcanic pressure is contained by layers of rock, but what keeps the lid on Saturn's atmospheric energy?

"To some extent, that same question applies to both Titan's and Saturn's meteorology," Ingersoll says. "There is more methane in Titan's atmosphere waiting to rain out than there is water vapor in the atmosphere on Earth. There's more latent heat stored, too, but only 1 percent as much sunlight to evaporate it. So there are two ways this could work: tremendously violent but infrequent rainstorms, because there isn't much energy to resupply them; or a steady, continuous drizzle. And the choice seems to be the same on both Saturn and Titan. We've seen the storms on Saturn, and we see erosion on Titan. A drizzle won't carve those channels. So that seems to be how weather works. You turn down the energy, and you still get storms. Who knew? That's why we study this stuff."

There's still time to figure it out. Cassini's mission is now planned to run through the northern hemisphere's summer solstice, in May 2017, allowing us to observe one complete change of Saturn's seasons, or a little less than half of a Saturnian year. 

Andrew Ingersoll, Earle C. Anthony Professor of Planetary Sciences, has been a leader in the investigation of planetary weather and climate for nearly five decades. His research has included studies of the so-called runaway greenhouse effect that is thought to have boiled away Venus's oceans, the presence of liquid water on Mars, the supersonic winds on Jupiter's moon Io, and the atmospheric dynamics of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. He has been a key player on the instrument teams for many NASA/JPL missions, including Pioneer Venus, Pioneer Saturn, Voyager, Mars Global Surveyor, Galileo, and Cassini.

Ingersoll recently spoke more about his research and why he has dedicated his career to exploring atmospheres in outer space. In particular, he spoke, about the Cassini mission—a robotic spacecraft that was launched in 1997 and has been orbiting Saturn, its rings, and its moons since 2004.

What do you study?

In a single word, it is atmospheres. I study the weather and climate of Earth and other planets.

Why?

It may be in my genes to like that kind of phenomenon. I like things that I can stick my hands into and feel and imagine. Other branches of physics were too abstract for me. The objects of interest were either too large or too small. I like the human scale.

I also really like the unknowns. At the end of my doctorate in 1966, I could have gone into the fields of meteorology, oceanography, or planetary science. Meteorology seemed too routine because it involved forecasting the weather every day. That's unfair, because there are big challenges, but still, it wasn't as appealing to me as the planets. We knew next to nothing about them in the 1960s and Caltech offered me a nice job as an assistant professor, studying the weather and climate of other planets.

What was the field like when you first started out?

In those days, I felt I was doing what early meteorologists and oceanographers were doing in the 1930s, during the war and right after, which was just kind of getting the basic understanding of what was going on.

In the 1960s, 70s, 80s—and even today—we were and are still building that fundamental understanding of the planets. What are the basic gears? What's making Venus so hot and Mars so cold and Jupiter a striped Christmas tree ball? All of these things are fascinating.

What do we learn from studying the atmospheres of other planets?

By studying the planets—with their wide array of personalities and behaviors—we learn about how atmospheres and how weather and climate work in general and we get a much broader picture and perspective than we could ever get from studying Earth alone. Earth has ice ages—and that's pretty interesting—but we can't look at the ice ages today except by proxies. But we can look at the planets right now.

What have we learned from studying other planets that you are most excited about?

In the broadest sense, we have learned humility—how difficult it is to extend our knowledge of Earth's weather and climate to other planets. The planets continue to surprise us with things we never imagined. For me, the planets themselves are the heroes of the space program. They keep coming through with exciting stuff that was waiting to be discovered.

What have we discovered by studying Saturn through the Cassini mission?

Saturn has everything: rings, magnetosphere, icy moons, a moon—Titan—with a dense atmosphere, and the giant planet itself. In the realm of atmospheres, three things stand out. One is the way Saturn erupts every 20 to 30 years with a giant thunderstorm that wraps around the planet and then dies. Another is the way Titan has developed a methane-based hydrologic cycle complete with lakes, rivers, clouds, and rain. The third is the way Enceladus, a little icy moon, manages to emit plumes of ice particles, water vapor, and other gases despite its low temperatures. The underground plumbing is a big mystery, but it may involve liquid water close to the surface.

What big questions/discoveries are you still interested in pursuing?

Cassini has answered many old questions and raised many new ones, and that's good. It means there is stuff out there waiting to be discovered. I hope to answer a few of the new questions. Also, there is Earth. My career as a planetary scientist has given me a willingness to speculate about processes here on Earth and maybe to see things that other people have missed. Even if it doesn't work out, I am going to take a look at some of the outstanding questions of Earth's weather and climate. For instance, there's a 60-day cycle of tropical rainfall known as the Madden Julian oscillation. That's a long lifetime for a weather pattern, and the models don't reproduce it very well. Also, there are 1000-year cycles recorded in the Greenland ice known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. That's much shorter than the orbital cycles and may represent sudden turnover of the oceans. Students and I are working on both projects right now.

What's next for you?

I'm involved with Juno, a spacecraft that is going into orbit around Jupiter in 2016. It carries a microwave radiometer that allows us to see down below the clouds at radio wavelengths. We will learn if the weather has roots in the deep atmosphere and whether the roots account for the long-term stability of the cloud features. Juno does many things, but it also gives us our first good look at the poles, where the weather is very unlike that at lower latitudes. Cassini goes on until 2017, and those two spacecraft will keep me busy. And there are always bright students who challenge me to think about new things.

PASADENA, Calif.—The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has been rated the world's number one university in the 2012–2013 Times Higher Education global ranking of the top 200 universities.

Oxford University, Stanford University, Harvard University, and MIT round out the top five.

"We are pleased to be among the best, and we celebrate the achievements of all our peer institutions," says Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau. "Excellence is achieved over many years and is the result of our focus on extraordinary people. I am proud of our talented faculty, who educate outstanding young people while exploring transformative ideas in an environment that encourages collaboration rather than competition."

Times Higher Education compiled the listing using the same methodology as in last year's survey. Thirteen performance indicators representing research (worth 30 percent of a school's overall ranking score), teaching (30 percent), citations (30 percent), international outlook (which includes the total numbers of international students and faculty and the ratio of scholarly papers with international collaborators, 7.5 percent), and industry income (a measure of innovation, 2.5 percent) make up the data. Included among the measures are a reputation survey of 17,500 academics; institutional, industry, and faculty research income; and an analysis of 50 million scholarly papers to determine the average number of citations per scholarly paper, a measure of research impact.

In addition to placing first overall in this year's survey, Caltech came out on top in the teaching indicator as well as in subject-specific rankings for engineering and technology and for the physical sciences.

"Caltech held on to the world's number one spot with a strong performance across all of our key performance indicators," says Phil Baty, editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. "In a very competitive year, when Caltech's key rivals for the top position reported increased research income, Caltech actually managed to widen the gap with the two universities in second place this year—Stanford University and the University of Oxford. This is an extraordinary performance."

Data for the Times Higher Education's World University Rankings were provided by Thomson Reuters from its Global Institutional Profiles Project, an ongoing, multistage process to collect and validate factual data about academic institutional performance across a variety of aspects and multiple disciplines.

The Times Higher Education site has the full list of the world's top 400 schools and all of the performance indicators.