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Titan's Smooth Surface Baffles Scientists
JazMuadDib writes "Scientists expected a few rough spots when their space drone snapped close-range images of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Instead, the planetlike moon appears to have a bizarre, mysteriously smooth surface, and Tuesday's images have left them in a state of wonder. Read more at the Tucson Citizen." NASA's Cassini pages have a wide assortment of images and analysis. Cassini's data has already thrown scientists for loop.
An earlier collision with the comet Botox.
than after months of anticipation, hard work, and millions of dollars to get to the moment of revealation where the mysterious coverings are peeled off, and my objective is laid bare, completely smooth, and ready for exploration.
The surface has no shadow detail, so it is impossible to determine whether peaks and valleys exist on the ground.
Here's the quote: Because of the global haze layer, Porco says, "we do not see shadows on the surface of Titan. And because we don't see shadow, we can't look at an image and immediately deduce what's up and what's down." There could be massive mountains and deep valleys there, or the surface could be completely flat. At this point, there's no way to tell.
Also, the interesting thing about Titan is that the cloud cover which should be methane seems to be composed of something else, altogether. Particles such as ethane and even polystyrene have been suggested as possible cloud particles. But until further investigation, it only seems to be that our initial theories of methane clouds were off the mark.
"That's no moon..." is the comment for Mimas, not Titan :)
"Instead, the planetlike moon appears to have a bizarre, mysteriously smooth surface"
That's no moon, it's a space station!
Mysteriously smooth? Could it be a bowling ball?
Someone should check with John Varley and see if he knows anything...
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
"WTF??" is where great science starts.
There could be massive mountains and deep valleys there, or the surface could be completely flat. At this point, there's no way to tell.
Am I missing something? The title of the slashdot entry discusses the smooth surface, but I RTFA, and scientists don't KNOW... period?
RTFA! The article doesnt say the surface is smooth .. they say they cant make out the surface's topography because the thick haze diffuses the light and prevents shadows from being formed preventing the discernment of topography .. There are as yet no conclusions about how rough or smooth the surface is. Please don't overhype this stuff.
.. hopefully.
If the Huygens mission is successful we'll know more
Another nifty bit was that the methane clouds don't seem to be methane.
Obviously, Titan picnicers have been shredding their plastic foam coffee cups, and the winds have whipped them aloft....See what I've been reading.
It's amazing that we've had to wait more than 20 years since he wrote that to get 700 miles from Titan, and it's mind-boggling that we're actually going to drop a probe in there.
It's just a shame that he's not around to see it.
Just to put the Cassini mission into perspective, no human being in the history of our species has ever seen the surface of Titan. No one, in the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been around, has been able to know what we are about to know.
Sure, this sort of thing has happened before - there was the first (and last) picture from the surface Venus, the first image of the far side of the moon, etc. I hope we haven't gotten too accustomed to it, at least not yet. I think we are amazingly fortunate to be able to see and know things that no one before could possibly have known. There is something there. Some people will think it's boring. "It's just rocks and mush," they'll say. But I think it's special. It's a place. It's an actual, real, physical place that is up there, just out of reach until now.
No amount of desire or commitment (or for that matter luck) could have revealed it to our fathers, or their fathers, or their fathers. No matter how badly they might have wanted to know it, it was hidden from them. They had to guess, or fantasize, or just live with the mystery. But we get to see it. We are the first.
And the best part about the universe is, there's always more to see just around the next corner.
Did the Covenant glass it?
Cassini's data has already thrown scientists for loop.
Main screen turn on!
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You think Titan's smooth - you should see Uranus...
*ducks*
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i don't think this should be such an odd find. what are the prerequisits for a planet/moon having tectonic plates? the article states that Titan has a pretty dense atmosphere, that would protect it from most objects hurdling through space.
...maybe the whole moon is covered in some sorta liquid goo that covers all the valleys and troughs (sp?)
maybe it just wants to be different.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
It looks lovely and smooth (and orange) in Celestia.
So how come NASA is surprised when Titan turns out to look similar to existing models? Do the rest of us know something that NASA doesn't?
It's funny. Laugh.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
is easily attributed to subtle variances in the curd temperature during the cheese formation process... oops wrong moon.
We're just walk-on extras in someone else's videogame, optimized to save rendering time where there's no prizes.
--
make install -not war
It's made out of antimatter! Don't try landing, the results could be catastrophic!!!
For the record, I *must* be a science fiction geek, because only a true SF fan would remember that Niven story.
I am hoping that the radar data can provide the elevation data they lack from the visual stuff.
Looking at some of the preliminary radar data (here), there's a strip 400km long, with no more than 100 meters of height variation. That's flatter than the state of Kansas!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
That wouldn't explain how it came to be a moon of Saturn.
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
Interesting that the article is in the "Local News" section of the Tucson Citizen.
I thought some of the landscapes around Tucson look extraterrestrial. Now it makes sense.
Cassini carries huygens, a land probe which will (hopefully) land on Titan on january 14th. There is an interesting story on ieee spectrum about an engineer who prevented the mission from certain failure.
"Thats no moon....THIS is a moon" -- Obi-Wan Kenobi drops pants
Dyslexics have more fnu.
right here
fascinating stuff. shows titan flat as a pancake for 100's of kilometers.
Among the recent images provided by NASA is a graph showing data from the ion and neutral mass spectrometer as Cassini sniffed Titan's upper atmosphere (far away from the cloud at the southern pole, if I understand it correctly). Some compounds have been identified by mass and labelled, such as hydrogen (2 Da), methane (16 Da) and nitrogen (28 Da).
However, I wonder what that unlabelled band at 7 Da (between hydrogen and methane) represents. What molecule could possibly have a mass of 7? I haven't taken a chemistry class since 1980, so please help me decode this. Are we seeing lithium ions or something?
As for the speculation that the clouds contain some "organic goo", didn't someone long ago suggest that the moon was made of cheese..?
Of course, I don't really know what a reasonable swell size in a planet-wide (alright, moon-wide) methane ocean would be.. 100m? With the wind data they've recorded, I wouldn't be shocked.
But let me stress - I'm not even an amateur physicist or astrononmer, I'm merely fascinated by this story.
Oh hell. The spheroids are at it again. Betty, get me my shotgun.
First off I'm not a chemist so please excuse me if this is totally off base.
Is it possible that the surface of Titan is basically a hydrocarbon mix that is basically like slush or jelly? With the cold temperature and higher atmospheric pressure wouldn't that turn all the ethane and methane into something not unlike diesel fuel when its really cold? This would explain the relative smooth face of Titan
Hmmm...maybe the Huygens probe will just bounce when it lands.
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
Is it just me, or is everyone noticing that each and every time we get new data on bodies in our solar system, scientists are "shocked", "mystified", "befuddled", etc. by the data? What exactly were they convinced of and proven wrong, after all the Ios, Encledaeus, et al surprises out there?
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
That sounds like the Red River Valley in MN. 315 miles long, 60 miles wide at its widest and only changes elevation 229 feet over the entire length. The only hills you see there are man made for highway overpasses.
Maybe the rest of Titan is as mountainous as Earth, hopefully more passes of the probe will let us know.
Why bother to render it with any more detail than absolutely necessary? And when the PC's get too close, obscure it with cloud.
And you call yourself geeks and gamers....
No one thought humans would take a close look at an object that fahr.
So, to save memory and computing power, they did a sketchy planet with small and blured texture in it.
Time to upgrade the matrix ?
Léa Gris
For those who don't get the joke: http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v 9i3/kansas.html
Ooh, maybe it's hot fudge or butterscotch.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
It would be like saying, "Yep, Mars is made of red rock and dust." That's not news, it's olds. There are probably heaps of discoveries that aren't brought to our attention because they fit the commonly held assumptions.
The discovery of Titan's flat surface is like the trailer to a movie. It leaves you wanting to know more, wanting to know why. It captures your interest, and so it's considered 'news'.
Although its good (for the type of people that read Slashdot) to know that theories are proven correct, it's just not interesting to the wider populace.
Depends on the kind of radar, and the techniques used.
t s6006.shtml
If they're doing Synthetic Aperture interferometry (i.e., multiple pass analysis), they can get range, azimuth, and phase, which can give outstanding accuracy (see, for example, Zebker and Goldstein's Topographic Mapping From Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar Observations, Journal of GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, NO. B5, pp. 4993-4999, Apr., 1986)
There's a decent online summary of the technique at http://www.gisdevelopment.net/aars/acrs/1997/ts6/
Now, since it's a spaceship fly-by, there's not as much chance for doing interferometry. You still have pretty good ranging signals. I don't know the accuracy in terms of meters, though.
I think they'll be doing SAR interferometry at some point in the project, but not yet. I think they'll do it from orbit, like Magellan did over Venus.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
In other news, yesterday a high energy beam from a mysterious spacecraft impinged on -- and disintegrated -- Titan's Hoarfrost district. The energetic photons swept without warning across a long swath of the oldest residential and commercial district on Titan, causing the ancient complex of slowly-grown crystalline towers and bridges to explode and collapse into dust. The area has been flattened. The unknown source of the destructive beam seems to have left the vicinity of Titan, at least for the present.
Based on the radar data, Titan is extremely flat. I've also seen on the posts here that people expect it to have some tetonics, or heat inside the planet due to all the stress of hanging around saturn.
Is it possible that the reason the satellite is so smooth is because of some erosion? If the weather conditions are hostile, and throw in that the clouds might consist of polymers, then that would just tear everything to shreds.
The article mentioned that this has "thrown scientists for loop". WTF does that mean? Is it something like:
for (;;)
{
launch_satellite();
if (strange_discovery)
throw "we've got hello from outer space!"
}
The third Death Star has finally been found. All these years it has been in a parking orbit in an out of the way solar system. Over time it picked up an atmosphere which is obscuring the laser turrets and docking ports.
Now the plot for the third Star Wars film is out.
Wow, a complete civilization that's sole job is to ride zamboni's across titan's surface completely resurfacing the whole thing. This must be a sign of life on Titan
My UID is prime is yours?
Hopefully by the time we arrive on Titan, there will be interesting things for Space Marines to shoot at.
-sig removed for tax purposes-
a flat moon covered with hydrocarbons. I thought alt.pave.the.earth was only a joke?
Kanga: That's not a fish, that's a bird.
Pooh: Yes, but is it a starling or a mackeral?
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/inst-cassini -radar-details.cfm
This link has a complete description of the RADAR instrument (along with the other instruments), which has a SAR built in but for height measurements is using a straight radar altimeter with "resolution between 90 and 150m"
That's no moon, that's a spacestation!!!! :)
Had to be said!
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Well, I can't say (unfortunately) that I'm a parent. Were I a parent, I wouldn't let a 13-year old read it. OTOH, I read it when I was 17. One of my high-school teachers recommended it, loaned it to me even. He did qualify it by saying that it had some mature content and wanted to know up front if I would be bothered by that. I read the whole series straight through (Titan, Wizard, Demon) and loved them. I don't remember the violence being any worse than a lot of other things teens read, including Tolkien. There was definitely a lot of sex, including a lesbian love affair between two main characters.
But it's been twenty years since I read it, and the fog of time may cloud my memory.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Last I checked 70% of the earths surface was +/- 50 meters too.
a) Titan is a moon of Saturn
b) A major collision is in no way necessary, sorry.
c) What you've written about gravitational stress is correct - tidal forces (difference in pull on various parts of planet due to varying radial distance from Saturn) cause the entire planet to be mildly deformed - think about tides on earth - if the sun, which is millions of miles away, can pull our water around (and the entire earth, a little, actually), think how magnified the forces must be that much closer to a massive body. This is the primary mechanism for liquidity and internal energy in any planetary body.
d) Fission is likely in any sufficiently dense object. Due to the great heat in the core, denser elements (such as uranium, plutonium, other radioactive elements) will sink to the bottom, where they will reach critical masses and fiss. In addition, fusion is likely, because electron degeneracy can be overcome in planetary cores.
e) If the core is ferrous, there will be a magnetic field. This will result in a 'dynamo' effect, causing further heating.
Rather remarkably, the Death Star does actually appear to be in orbit around Saturn, but it's not Titan, it's Mimas.
Perhaps this possibility is precluded by other data but it would make sense for the surface to be smooth(ish) if it was all liquid. As for the 50m high variations , well in gravity that low it could be easily possible for normal waves to be that height (though where does the energy come from? Don't know). Anyway , just a though...
I think the first of those images especially is much more interesting than the "flatter than a pancake" altitude reading in the original post. You can see a lot of surface detail (unfortunately in a region where we don't yet have optical imaging). Look at the left side of the 'diversity' image. Notice the large dark circular feature? Circular feature == crater on a moon like Titan. That is something that we hadn't seen in the optical images. Then notice the bright area inside the crater rim. On these radar images, bright area == roughed up surface. Notice the little squiggly white bit going down from the bright area to the center of the crater? That has got to be an erosion channel from liquid running down into the crater. Then look at the center of the crater. You see another feature with very smooth edges, shaped sort of like a peanut. Any guesses as to what that is? My guess is a pool of the liquid that ran down. Very exciting image!
I watched Gattaca last night, what a great movie. I loved seeing Jerome's (the main character, Ethan Hawke) description of Titan.
He was smoking a cigarrette at dinner and was asked "What is Titan like at this time of the Year?". He took a puff of his cigarrate and blew the smoke into a glass of wine.
What a great visual and great description.
--
Brandon Petersen
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"habits." And you forgot the pedants! HOW could you forget the pedants!
That's flatter than the state of Kansas!
... well at least those of the IHOP variety anyway.
Then by conjecture, that would also make the surface of Titan flatter than a pancake!
I think those theories are seldom actually wrong, but they may have been simplified to the point that they are easily misinterpreted or misapplied. I remember around 1980, when one of the Voyager probes sent back stunning images of Saturn's rings, and scientists tried to understand the strange strokes, swirls and whatever phenomena they saw in those images. One newspaper went as far as saying that Saturn's rings defied the laws of physics, which therefore had to be rewritten!
Already Isaac Newton understood that a gravitational system with more than two bodies involved could not be fully described analytically. Calculating the positions of the nine major planets and their natural satellites is complex enough. Before Voyager, we had never seen a gravitational system with a trillion closely interacting bodies. Physicists weren't amazed by the Voyager images because the theory of gravity was wrong (it of course wasn't), but because they couldn't predict what such a complex system would look like. A layman (in particular a journalist) may perceive that amazement as an admission of error in science, when in fact it's only a leap forward.
Then again, in some cases new discoveries do invalidate earlier scientific theories, but hardly those theories the general public knows about. Cosmic string theory and such isn't that mature yet.