Pictures of Titan's Lakes

sighted writes "For decades, scientists have wondered if the thick orange haze that shrouds Saturn's giant moon Titan hid lakes of liquid methane on the surface, but there was no way to confirm it, until now. The Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006 took these striking images and were released today."

Comments

Vacation on Titan

[Stephen Tennant]

Swimming in liquid farts

Re:Vacation on Titan

[garcia]

That would then be like vacationing in Bayonne, NJ or Scranton, PA and no one wants to do that.

Confirmed?

[Cthefuture]

You mean "more evidence suggesting liquid"?

Hardly proof.

More information at ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This other location at the Cassini site, and this older article from the BBC.

The original article is in the journal Nature, but you need a subscription to view it. You can still read the abstract, though.

Somebody has to say it

[LarryLong]

Maybe the methane came from Uranus? Sorry. :)

Re:why is liquid methane a big deal?

[darkonc]

The reactions that we're used to will obviously not work on Titan, but there's always a (very small) possibility that other forms of life could could evolve in the context of methane seas. If nothing else, a liquid base would allow simple life forms to develop without having to figure out the physics of supporting themselves and move around (as per the way that life is believed to have evolved on earth).

However, given that just about any chemical process is gonna run rather slow at the kinds of temperatures that exist on Titan we shouldn't expect any life that we find there to be very developed.

The next obvious step is to send something down to swim in the methane oceans of titan, and see if it gets eaten (or, at least, finds signs of (non)organic life. I don' think that it's that much lower a probability than finding life signs on mars (presuming that we figure out how to look for methane-based life), although it's admittedly a bit more expensive to go to Jupiter than it is to go to Mars.

We've already landed there ffs.

[mollymoo]

Am I the only one who can remember that we put a lander on Titan a good 18 months prior to taking this image? The presence of liquid methane on the surface was confirmed one week later. Nice image, bad caption.

Re:We've already landed there ffs.

[Tablizer]

The lander did *not* detect existing pooled or flowing liquid. The radar evidence appears to be the first evidence of existing pooled/flowing liquid. The lander found plenty of *hints* of erosion typical of that associated with liquid, but it did not detect any active liquid (except maybe methane mist). The area it landed at is often characterized as a "dry lake bed".

Re:Liquid methane? Maybe.

[stoicio]

"The images are blatantly false-colour. The blue areas meant to potray liquid (making people think of water) but could just as easily be ice or lava flows."

Actually the intensity of the backscatter data is what is being shown.
The brightness is logarithmic, therefore anything dark is very smooth
and anything really bright is very bumpy. Since it is a log scale and
there is a good idea what kind of backscatter to absorption ratio to expect
from the synthetic aperture radar for various targets, they can conclude that
the dark patches are glassy/ice-rink flat.

They can also conclude that the dark patches could be liquid based on
change detection, provided they have another series of overlapping data
to compare. If the glassy areas undulate slightly between images (waves)
they are probably liquid.

Having noted this, 500 metres is kind of crappy resolution for
SAR data. You'd think they'd make a closer flyby or put a better
instrument onboard. I believe 1 (one) metre resolution SAR was available
from instruments at the same altitude when cassini was designed.
NASA just cheaped out.

Re:Any signs of Transformers...?

[NeuroManson]

No, that's just Michael Bay.