Confirmation of Water on Titan
“Detection of liquid ethane in Ontario Lacus confirms a long-held idea that lakes and seas filled with methane and ethane exist on Titan,” said researcher Larry Soderblom of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz.
Considered the largest moon of Saturn and the second largest moon in the solar system, astronomers have always suspected that the giant Titan had an atmosphere on it. They also suspected that frozen water was on its surface due to its low temperatures of minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. But suspecting and knowing are too different things, and just recently it was proven by Cassini fly-bys and image studies of the International Cassini spacecraft that Titan has several lake-like features which contain liquid hydrocarbons. This makes Saturn’s moon the only solar system body which has liquid on its surface—other than Earth.
The radar images that the Cassini spacecraft was focusing on was located at Titan’s South Pole, taken on December 20, 2007, in an area of 385 miles by 170 miles. The images gave evidence to wide river channels, along with short and chaotic drainage patterns. Eroded rugged terrain seemed to be eroded by flowing liquids, seemingly from a combination of methane rainstorms and sapping—where subsurface methane rose to erode the surface. The interesting aspect seen by Cassini was the flat-floored broad valleys, filled with smooth materials with sharply defined, relatively straight sides. It is known by scientists that this type of area can be formed by tectonic processes, caused by flowing liquid or ice, rifting, or erosion processes. Called Ontrio Lacus, the imaged area has been proven to be filled mostly with methane and ethane, hydrocarbons that are gases on Earth, yet liquid on Titan due to the cold temperature.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s 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 orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
