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Cassini Finds Evidence For Ocean Inside Titan
Riding with Robots writes "NASA reports that by using data from the Cassini probe's radar, scientists established the locations of 50 unique landmarks on the surface of Saturn's planet-size moon Titan. They then searched for these same lakes, canyons and mountains in the data after subsequent Titan flybys. They found that the features had shifted from their expected positions by up to 30 kilometers. NASA says a systematic displacement of surface features would be difficult to explain unless the moon's icy crust was decoupled from its core by an internal ocean, making it easier for the crust to move. If confirmed, this discovery would add to the growing list of moons in the solar system that are icy on the outside and warm and liquid inside, providing potential habitats. We've previously discussed Titan's hydrocarbon lakes and potential cryovolcano."
Titan is one of the most exciting bodies in our solar system. Having recently read Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, he wrote a fair bit about the abundance of organic molecules on Titan. We seem to keep discovery more and more exciting things about this moon. It's probably still unlikely that there is life on it, but it sure would be interesting to send a probe in to it and see what we can discover.
Life ON gas giants seems like a big NO with what we currently know about the conditions required for life to emerge. But life around gas giants, on their moons seems plausible.
What I'd like to know (read: what I'd like some slashdotter with the required know-how explain to me) is why are these moons hot on the inside, possibly hot enough for water ice to turn into liquid water. It's so incredibly far away from the sun. Is this caused by their size and subsequent internal dynamics?
Also, aren't these moons constantly bombarded with radiation from their host planet's powerful magnetic field? Must be rough for aliens.
Don't forget that the melting point of water *decreases* as pressure increases. The liquid core may well be damned cold!
While it is very likely that the interiors of a couple moons in the solar system have subsurface liquid oceans, that does not indicate high enough temperature at depth to consider the interior warm or hot or capable of supporting life. Over geologic time these subsurface liquids (which are thought to be predominantly H2O) have more likely formed through interaction with surrounding rock/metal. As H2O reacts with its surroundings and incorporates various impurities (salts, ammonia, organic molecules) into its structure the melting point is decreased to the point that a liquid or fluid condition is possible at significantly lower temperatures. Although in the case of Ganymede (Jupiter's fourth moon), which posses an internally generated magnetic field, a dynamo action similar to Earth's core may exist providing heat. Whether this is the case on Titan is yet to be determined. The massive amounts of organic components there make it harder to determine if there is an internal heat source or if the mixture of organic compounds are naturally stable at those conditions creating the lakes and cryovolcanoes previously mentioned.
If there are oceans, there may just be enough space to sustain alien marine lives for future astronauts driving fast approaching giant battleships to dig up some King and Queen Fossils, and Great Things will happen.
And on the Titan internet's #1 news for nerds website, dot slash, they're posting about how there may be oceans on Earth :P Btw this is good cuz now astronaughts can go swimming cuz you know how they're always saying it's hard to get enough exercise in space with no gravity.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Too bad Arthur C. Clarke passed away on Tuesday (Wed. in Sri Lanka), he would have been very pleased to have his suspicions confirmed like this. Then again, maybe he's hanging with Dave Bowman and HAL. In that case his response might be whatever a stylish English gentleman says instead of "Duh!".
Rest in peace, Sir Arthur, and thanks for giving us "all these worlds."
-- a sad fan who's enjoyed your books for over 20 yearsQuantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
I, for one, welcome our Titan Overlords!
Okay, I have a (dumb?) question for the rocket scientists here : since we have this nice rover design that we know works well on Mars, wouldn't it be interesting to send one on Titan to take a closer look?
:)
I mean I know it's a hell of a lot farther than Mars, but could anyone explain what are the biggest obstacles? Is it cost, accuracy, surface conditions, difficulties for reliable communication... ?
Forgive my wild enthusiasm, but this is all very interesting and I either want us to send robots there or to know why we can't
...when you can't remember where you left your geographical features?
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
The Mars rover is solar powered. Titan is too far from the Sun to make that practical. So while a rover could be sent, it would have to be significantly different from the current designs.
chewy on the inside.
"icy on the outside and warm and liquid inside"
Anybody else think of cadbury eggs when they read this?
..::ALWAYS : watching::..
So now there's Europa and now Titan that have probable underground oceans, and oceans seem like good candidates for life.
It would be interesting, if in the future, we find that most life actually forms on moons with oceans protected from the vaccum of space.
Maybe out planet, with it's skin lain bare to the cosmos, is an exception for a life-harboring world. Maybe this is why we haven't heard from any other intelligent lifeforms; perhaps they all have severe agoraphobia and just freak-out when they send their first probes up through the surface.
Let's hope the wouldn't suffer from the Krikkit xenophobic mindset, or we might be finding out exactly how good we humans are at international...er, interplanetary negotiations...oh my, I certainly hope we don't have to find out!
Read my Very Short "Stories"
They found that the features had shifted from their expected positions by up to 30 kilometers.
Are they sure it's not just another metric-english-units screwup?
Table-ized A.I.
So what if Titan has an ocean for a mantle. That doesn't mean it could be a better habitat for humans. At least in the short term, anyway. The crust is hundreds of kilometers thick on Titan. We can't drill that deep on Earth, where we can carry huge things around. If we wanted to get the water out of Titan, or Ganymede or Enceladus or Europa or any other water-filled moon, for that matter, we'd need to bring huge drills that weigh millions of kilograms; given our present technology, that is impossible, technologically, logistically, and economically. That doesn't mean Titan isn't a lucrative place to colonize; it's entire surface composition is very rich in potential rocket fuel. Once we establish an infrastructure on to harvest methane from its atmosphere or scoop stuff out of its seas and lakes, it would take half of the problem out of colonizing the outer solar system. But we'd still need to build an extremely expensive infrastructure, first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Stephen_Baxter)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I meant biotic in origin.
A blog about stuff.
i actually had to read that one a few times, to make sure i read it right :S
You might like to have a look at "Slow Life", by Michael Swanwick.
http://www.analogsf.com/Hugos/slowlife.shtml
It's a nice sci-fi novelette (that won the Hugo in 2003) about life in the deep seas of Titan.
http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/Hugo2003.htm
http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/Hugo2003.html#nvt
"Is there life on Titan? Probably not. It's cold down there! 94 Kelvin is the same as -179 Celsius, or -290 Fahrenheit. And yet . . . life is persistent. It's been found in Antarctic ice and in boiling water in submarine volcanic vents. Which is why we'll be paying particular attention to exploring the depths of the ethane-methane sea. If life is anywhere to be found, that's where we'll find it."
I really liked Arthur C. Clark's works. I liked 'Songs of a Distant Earth' the best. The 2001,2010,2060,3001 series was fantastic.
But it was science fiction. It will never be true, not the alien intelligence, not HAL, not monoliths on the moon, and especially not human travel to distant planets. Don't mod me down or call me a Luddite, but it's just not going to happen.
Guys, these are not distant points on the Earth like Antarctica or some other place that you can climb into to a machine, fill it with fuel and just go to. These are dots in the night sky. They are millions of miles away. And there is nothing there that can justify the unbelievably large public expense and the near-certain failure of such a journey. The prospect of increasing quote unquote scientific knowledge just doesn't cut it anymore.
Guess what! We're broke! We pissed away all the funds that you would have liked to have spent on space travel on wars, debt service, and bail-outs for sub-prime mortgage banks. Remember the senator who said fifty years ago, "A billion here, a billion there, soon you start talking about real money!". Well we spent a hundred billion here and a hundred billion there, lost a few hundred billion here and there and didn't log in a few hundred billion over the years on account of secret 'black box' projects. And now we're broke.
Not only are we broke, but we are facing climate change, overpopulation (and its endless expensive wars), and economic meltdown. The US dollar lost 50% of its value next to the world's second major currency (the euro) in less than five years. Housing prices are falling 5% a quarter, food costs are rising 10-20% a year, oil is over $100 a barrel, and gold is over $1000 an ounce. And we're broke, and deeply in debt on all levels.
Gentlemen, we must accept the finality of reality after having expired all the other options. There isn't going to be any manned space travel program to other planets. There is unlikely to be any more trips to the moon.
It was great, it was fun, it fired the imagination of generations. But it's over.
At least we still have Star Trek reruns.
Again, don't mod me down for pointing out the reality of our current situation. It is real and the space program no longer is.
Thank you. Damn. Slashdaughters are the toughest audience to explain this to. Go put your brains into solving some real problems. Forget space exploration.
There are so many hydrocarbons observed in the universe outside Earth that we haven't even identified all we've discovered. The environment of Earth in its early history was chemically much like that of the present-day gas giants: reducing. This is a critical point because it allows hydrocarbon synthesis and re-synthesis. Self-replicating molecules can, in theory, be very simple compared to what you probably referred to hand-wavingly as "life" just now. Sagan (along with others, IIRC) proposed "floaters" and "hunters" as entirely viable, but hypothetical forms of life viable on a gas giant such as Jupiter. These represent complex multicellular life and not Archaea-like single-celled life, which would be more likely, let alone simpler self-replicating biopolymers like DNA or RNA, or perhaps something more exotic.
Earth's present environment (for the last 2.5-3 billion years) has been oxidizing rather rather than reducing, due (per current theory) to the average thermal speed of light molecules exceeding that of local gravity (we know this is the case, but of course we have to take an educated guess that it's actually the cause and not simply a true but irrelevant consequence of physical laws).
The problem is not so much that even the ancestor of Life As We Know It is impossible on gas giants, but rather our inability to determine the likelihood of life arising in an environment given an environment capable of sustaining life. In the language of the Drake Equation, we know Ne poorly is irrelevant because we know it's at least as big as Fl and we think that Fl is probably much less than 1 (i.e. life doesn't always arise even when conditions are suitable to sustain it).
It's not so impossible that there is life on gas giants, even if it is improbable in the minds of some very different life forms from a very different environment.
"We believe that about 100 kilometers (62 miles) beneath the ice and organic-rich surface is an internal ocean of liquid water mixed with ammonia,"
Liquid water mixed with ammonia? Sounds like pee to me! An ocean of pee, with an organic icy crust floating on top of it, the whole surrounded by an atmosphere of methane... This place sounds awfully much like the toilets of the solar system.
I don't think I want to know what the core is made of..
You just got troll'd!