Titan is the only moon in the solar system with liquid on its surface and an atmosphere.
Earth is not alone in the solar system to host rivers, lakes and seas. On Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, liquids carve its surface, except it’s not water, but liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane. Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all known reserves of oil and natural gas on Earth.
A new paper published today in Nature communication discovers more about Titan’s strange bodies of water, 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 sent back the first images of Titan’s surface in 2005. It saw ancient dry shorelines that they resembled the Earth and rivers of methane.
As the space agency prepares to launch its Dragonfly spacecraft to Titan in 2027, more information on the moon’s water bodies will help mission planners.
Images from NASA’s Cassini mission show networks of rivers draining into lakes at Titan’s north pole … [+]
Like Earth?
Titan is the most Earth-like place we know, with an atmosphere (albeit 98% nitrogen and 2% methane) as well as rain, ice, lakes, oceans, valleys, mountain ridges, mesas and dunes. Vast dune fields, flat plains and polar regions with vast 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 14% of Earth’s. It sees only 1% of the sunlight received by Earth.
So Titan is not Earth-like, although aerial and radar images of how the flow of liquid methane, rather than water, has carved its surface make it look that way.
Titan’s small lakes are more than 300 feet deep and 10 miles wide and located on top of great hills and plateaus.
These six infrared images of Saturn’s moon Titan represent some of the clearest, most … [+]
Discovered lakes
New research using radar data from Cassini on three of its polar seas – the Kraken, Ligeia and Punga Mare – reveals details that make them even stranger. They found that the lakes contained varying levels of methane and ethane, more methane in rivers than in seas and waves that are larger near coasts, estuaries and straits, suggesting tidal currents.
Previous research has found that Titan’s rivers do not have enough flow or sediment to build deltas—fan-shaped land created by sediment transported by fast-flowing rivers as they enter a stagnant lake)—but some flow as wide and fast. rivers that flow on Earth, like the Mississippi.
Spectacular science
Set to reach Titan in 2034, NASA’s Dragonfly mission will last for two years after its lander reaches the surface. During the mission, a rover will fly to a new location every Titan day (16 Earth days) to sample the giant moon’s prebiotic chemistry. It will also search for chemical signatures, past and present, from water-based life to that which can use liquid hydrocarbons, investigate the Moon’s active methane cycle and explore prebiotic chemistry in the atmosphere and on the surface .
“Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission of broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps in this mission,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. . “Exploring Titan will push the limits of what we can do with extraterrestrial rovers.”
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