Titan is the one moon within the solar system with a liquid on its surface and an environment.
The Earth is just not the just one within the solar system that has rivers, lakes and seas. On Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, liquids form its surface, but these will not be water, but liquid hydrocarbons comparable to ethane and methane. Titan has lots of of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all known oil and natural gas reserves on earth.
A brand new paper published today in Nature communication reveals more about Titan’s bizarre waters, including waves, currents, estuaries and straits.
It uses archival data from NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017 and whose Huygens probe the primary images of the Titan surfacein 2005. There were ancient, dry coastlines paying homage to Earth and rivers of methane.
As the space agency prepares to launch its Dragonfly spacecraft to Titan in 2027, more information in regards to the moon’s waters will help mission planners.
Images from NASA’s Cassini mission show river networks flowing into lakes at Titan’s north pole. … [+]
Like earth?
Titan is probably the most Earth-like place we all know of, with an environment (though 98% nitrogen and a couple of% methane), in addition to rain, ice, lakes, oceans, valleys, mountain ranges, plateaus and dunes. Large dune fields, flat plains and polar regions with large seas and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons dominate its landscape. Its surface temperature is about -290 degrees Fahrenheit (-179 degrees Celsius), while Titan’s gravity is just 14% of Earth’s. Titan receives just one% of the daylight that Earth receives.
Titan is due to this fact hardly Earth-like, although aerial and radar images showing how the surface was formed by the flow of liquid methane (slightly than water) give this impression.
The small lakes of Titan are over 300 feet deep and 10 miles wide and are positioned on large hills and plateaus.
These six infrared images of Saturn’s moon Titan are among the many clearest and … [+]
Revealed Lakes
The recent study of radar data from the Cassini spacecraft in three polar seas – Kraken, Ligeia and Punga Mare – reveals details that make them even stranger. They found that lakes contained various levels of methane and ethane, rivers contained more methane than seas, and that waves are larger near shores, estuaries and straits, suggesting tidal currents.
Previous research has shown that Titan’s rivers don’t carry enough current or sediment to form deltas (fan-shaped terrain created by the sediment carried by fast-flowing rivers as they empty right into a standing lake). However, some rivers flow like wide, fast-flowing rivers on Earth, comparable to the Mississippi.
Spectacular science
NASA’s Dragonfly mission is scheduled to achieve Titan in 2034 and can last two years after its lander lands. During the mission, a helicopter will fly to a brand new location every Titan day (16 Earth days) to take samples of the large moon’s prebiotic chemistry. It may also search for chemical biosignatures from the past or present, from water-based life to life which may use liquid hydrocarbons. It may also study the moon’s energetic methane cycle and explore prebiotic chemistry within the atmosphere and on the surface.
“Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with great public interest and we look forward to taking the next steps of this mission,” said Nicky Fox, deputy director of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotary-wing aircraft beyond Earth.”
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