Page 4 January 4, 2018
Finance
Intense Methane Rainstorms Hit
Saturn’s Largest Moon, Titan
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, behind the planet’s rings. The much smaller moon Epimetheus is visible in the foreground.
Photo Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
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How to Lower Your Monthly
Mortgage Payment
(BPT) - Owning your own home comes
with many advantages, including escaping
rising rents and the personal and financial
stability associated with homeownership.
Fortunately, millions of Americans, with
less than 20 percent down, have been able
to buy a home sooner thanks to mortgage
insurance (MI). If you don’t put down 20
percent of the mortgage cost, you will likely
be required to purchase MI, which enables
low-down-payment borrowers to qualify for
home financing from lenders.
While homeownership has many benefits
and continues to be part of the American
Dream, it is not without costs. Several surveys
have found that the majority of first-time
homebuyers - over 80 percent according to
one study - put less than 20 percent down.
For these borrowers, there is usually the
added expense of MI, which may give some
of these borrowers pause.
But there is good news: the monthly private
mortgage insurance premiums do not last
forever on most conventional loans. And
when private MI (PMI) cancels, homeowners
will have more cash in their pockets each
month - money that is available for home
improvements or other goals. It is important
to understand, however, that not all MI is
the same, and not all MI can be canceled.
There are numerous low-down-payment
mortgage options available that include MI.
The two most common are: (1) home loans
backed 100 percent by the government through
the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
that include both an upfront and annual
mortgage insurance premium (MIP); and (2)
conventional loans, which are typically backed
at least in part by private sources of capital,
such as private MI. The key difference is that
one form can be canceled (PMI) while the
other (FHA) typically cannot be canceled.
An FHA loan can be obtained with a down
payment as low as 3.5 percent. However, be
aware that you will typically have to pay a
mortgage insurance premium (MIP) of 1.75
percent of the total loan amount at closing
or have it financed into the mortgage. In
addition to your regular monthly mortgage
payments on your FHA loan, you will also
pay a fixed monthly MIP fee for the life of
the loan. This means you could pay hundreds
of dollars extra every month - thousands over
the life of the loan - until you pay off the
entirety of the loan.
If you obtain a conventional loan with
PMI, you can put as little as 3 percent down.
Like an FHA loan, PMI fees are generally
factored into your monthly mortgage payment.
However, PMI can often be canceled once
you have established 20 percent equity in
the home and/or the principal balance of the
mortgage is scheduled to reach 78 percent
of the home’s original value. This means
that the rest of your mortgage payments will
not include any extra fees, so that your payments
go down in time, saving you money
each month. What you save in the long run
can then be put toward expenses like home
renovations, which can further increase your
home’s value.
MI is a good thing because it bridges the
divide between a low down payment and
mortgage approval. But not all MI is created
equal. If you want to buy a home but still
save in the long run, PMI might be the right
option for you. Check out lowdownpaymentfacts.
org to learn more. •
Looking Up
Based on a Press Release from
UCLA, Provided by Bob Eklund
Titan, the largest of Saturn’s more than 60
moons, has surprisingly intense rainstorms,
according to research by a team of UCLA
planetary scientists and geologists. Although
the storms are relatively rare—they occur
less than once per Titan year, which is 29
and a half Earth years—they occur much
more frequently than the scientists expected.
“I would have thought these would be
once-a-millennium events, if even that,”
said Jonathan Mitchell, UCLA associate
professor of planetary science and a senior
author of the research, which was published
in the journal Nature Geoscience. “So this
is quite a surprise.”
The storms create massive floods in terrain
that are otherwise very cold deserts. Titan’s
surface is strikingly similar to Earth’s, with
flowing rivers that spill into great lakes and
seas, and the moon has storm clouds that
bring seasonal, monsoon-like downpours,
Mitchell said. But Titan’s precipitation is
liquid methane, not water.
“The most intense methane storms in our
climate model dump at least a foot of rain
a day, which comes close to what we saw
in Houston from Hurricane Harvey this
summer,” said Mitchell, the principal investigator
of UCLA’s Titan climate modeling
research group.
Sean Faulk, a UCLA graduate student and
the study’s lead author, said the study also
found that the extreme methane rainstorms
may imprint that moon’s icy surface in much
the same way that extreme rainstorms shape
Earth’s rocky surface.
On Earth, intense storms can trigger large
flows of sediment that spread into lowlands
and form cone-shaped features called alluvial
fans. In the new study, the UCLA scientists
found that regional patterns of extreme rainfall
on Titan are correlated with recent detections
of alluvial fans, suggesting that they were
formed by intense rainstorms.
The finding demonstrates the role of extreme
precipitation in shaping Titan’s surface, said
Seulgi Moon, UCLA assistant professor of
geomorphology and a co-senior author of the
paper. Moon said the principle likely applies
to Mars, which has large alluvial fans of its
own, and to other planetary bodies. Greater
understanding of the relationship between
precipitation and the planetary surfaces could
lead to new insights about the impact of
climate change on Earth and other planets.
Titan’s alluvial fans were detected by a
radar instrument on the Cassini spacecraft,
which began orbiting Saturn in late 2004. The
Cassini mission ended in September 2017,
when NASA programmed it to plunge into
the planet’s atmosphere as a way to safely
destroy the spacecraft.
Juan Lora, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar
and a co-author of the paper, said Cassini
has revolutionized scientists’ understanding
of Titan.
Although Titan’s alluvial fans are a new
discovery, scientists have had eyes on its surface
for years. Shortly after Cassini reached
Saturn, radar and other instruments showed
that vast sand dunes dominated Titan’s lower
latitudes, while lakes and seas dominated its
higher latitudes. The UCLA scientists found
that the alluvial fans are mostly located between
50 and 80 degrees latitude—close to
the centers of Titan’s northern and southern
hemispheres, but generally slightly closer to
the poles than to the equator.
Such variations in surface features suggest
Titan has corresponding regional variations in
precipitation, because rainfall and subsequent
runoff play a key role in eroding land and
filling lakes, while the absence of rainfall
promotes the formation of dunes. •
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