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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 :)
"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
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.
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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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.
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make install -not war
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.
i don't think this should be such an odd find. what are the prerequisits for a planet/moon having tectonic plates?
A major collision with a large planetoid is the main requirement (imparting a huge amount of heat), and a means of keeping this energy in the core, so that at least the central part of the planet/moon remains semi-liquid. Otherwise everything would just cool down and become a solid lump.
Titan is believed to be heated by gravitation stress from Jupiter, if not from the magnetic field as well. There could also be natural fission.
It is going to be interesting to see if there is enough liquid to partially or completely cover the surface (oceans/continents, marshy areas, complete ocean with high waves/frozen poles).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"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.
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.
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....
> Titan is believed to be heated by gravitation stress from Jupiter...
Titan is a moon of Saturn, not Jupiter.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
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
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.
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?
Many people are confusing two separate issues here: visual imaging and radar topography. On this one pass, and on each of the other passes, Cassini will get A) visual image data on large parts of Titan's surface and B) radar topography on a SMALL PART. The radar sequence is very short -- they just get a little strip of radar data at closest approach and then that's it for that pass.
OVER MONTHS AND YEARS, they will gather enough to put it together and form a complete body of INTEGRATED visual and topographic data, and then we'll get the cool flyover renderings that make us all wet our pants.
But for now they have lots of visual data, which they CAN NOT use for determining topographic details due to the lack of shadowing, and a tiny bit of radar which they CAN.
One simple rule for its versus it's