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Titan's Icy Surface Revealed

Posted by michael on from the tire-chains-mandatory dept.

Sven-Erik writes "BBC News writes about an article in the journal Science: Scientists have peered through the smoggy orange haze of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and seen icy bedrock exposed on the surface. The observations reveal a surface that is not entirely covered by liquid and solid organic materials that rain out of the atmosphere, as was thought."

14 comments

  1. IR images by barakn · · Score: 1

    Where is the photographic evidence to back up their statements?

    --
    "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
  2. hmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    With all those hydrocarbons Titan could be next for a liberation

  3. Is this news? by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 3, Informative

    I can't find the Science paper referenced (it doesn't seem to have hit the website yet), but from what I'm reading at the BBC site, this isn't news. We've had IR observations of Titan for at over a decade now. (Heck, Griffiths was the author of the papers.) That the surface of Titan wasn't purely methane/ethane oceans was an immediate conclusion from those data. (They also determined that there was a significant amount of water ice on the surface. Which might be what they BBC article means by "like Ganymede".)

    I'll have to wait to see the paper to see what's new about their results, but I haven't heard anything yet that I haven't heard before.

    1. Re:Is this news? by barakn · · Score: 3, Informative

      For those who haven't seen the old images....

      --
      "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
  4. More about Titan... by breon.halling · · Score: 4, Informative

    More info is here.

    And while you're at it, you may want to check out Celestia, a 3D space simulator.

    --
    "Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
    1. Re:More about Titan... by Blaine+Hilton · · Score: 1

      An open-source space sim? Now that looks interesting...

    2. Re:More about Titan... by breon.halling · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yeah! I've been playing with it for a couple of months now. Lots of fun, and there are lots of mods/add-ons for it, too: here and here!

      Enjoy!

      --
      "Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
  5. Probably in a paper by Spamalamadingdong · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the article, the data analyzed were the spectra in certain IR bands which can penetrate the hydrocarbon smog. This isn't the kind of thing which generates neat pictures; however, a map of Titan which shows the ice "land" and the hydrocarbon "sea" would be. That might not have made it into the article because it's still being generated, or saved for publication in something more prestigious than a news release.

    --
    Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
    1. Re:Probably in a paper by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      There have been no visible wavelength photographs taken of Titan's surface -- the atmosphere is too thick. The findings in this paper are all from the IR spectra.

      As for getting photographs, that's what the Hygens probe on board Cassini is supposed to do when it drops into Titan's atmosphere sometime after Cassini arrives at Saturn in 2004.

    2. Re:Probably in a paper by barakn · · Score: 1

      Hubble has 2 instruments capable of spectrometry and imaging in infrared or near-infrared wavelengths: the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. It wasn't totally unrealistic to expect images along with spectra.

      --
      "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
  6. Too hot, too little UV, said TISA by Muhammar · · Score: 3, Funny

    TISA experts conceded that while Earth has fairly dense atmosphere, its very high surface temperature and presence of oxygen makes the existence of liquid methane on Earth unlikely.

    [Increase your sprout and root potency! 6 day free trial! Guaranteed success or your ferricyanide back!]

    --
    I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
  7. Let's bomb it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then we can take control of the evil titanians methane resources.