NASA discoveries: Amazing scientific finds or just a hype machine?

[Dutch]

'Nothing we've seen before': Gigantic ice cloud spotted on Titan

I've known some folks that have worked at NASA over the years and they are some of the most brilliant folks I've ever known. But I'll admit it, I'm not a very big space exploration guy, nothing about space really captures my imagination unless I could actually go there. So the moon and Mars are interesting....but outside of that, I don't really care what we discover unless we discover life....which I'm not sure we can really do from a telescope.

So, when I see stuff like this about an Ice Cloud...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft recently discovered the "monstrous" new ice cloud in Titan's stratosphere

...or....

“When we looked at the infrared data, this ice cloud stood out like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” Carrie Anderson, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. “It practically smacked us in the face.”

...or...

"I was so excited, I pretty much fell out of my chair," Anderson said, while presenting the results at a news briefing earlier this month.

...I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around what the excitement is of seeing an ice cloud. If it's not hype, then I am missing the point of this type of excitement. Maybe I'm just a bad American...

[nol]

This particular article is just saying that thanks to new technology we are able to know a little more about the conditions on Titan. Somewhat analogous to how at some point people were able to figure out that the red spot on Jupiter was actually a huge storm.

As far as life goes, Titan is significant because it is the only other location in the solar system known to have liquid on its surface (methane in this case). Water being abundant in solid, liquid, and gas form on Earth is one of its unique properties that made it crucial to the development of life, and the thinking is that methane could potentially play the same role on Titan. To extrapolate a bit, the findings of large ice clouds could mean that solid methane on Titan is more abundant than previously imagined.