Liquid Lakes On Saturn's Moon Confirmed

Riding with Robots writes "Scientists have been using the robotic spacecraft Cassini to explore what looked to be large lakes of hydrocarbons on the surface of Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan. But they couldn't be entirely sure that the features were actually liquid lakes, and not simply very smooth, solid material. Now, new findings seem to confirm that the observations really do show extensive seas of liquid ethane and other hydrocarbons. In fact, Titan seems to have an entire 'water' cycle of ethane evaporation, rain and rivers."

Comments

Saturn == LA?

[dlgeek]

FTA: "[T]hese particles form a ubiquitous hydrocarbon haze that hinders the view."
Sounds just like LA.

Amazing!

[4D6963]

Please tell me that all these rovers on Mars were just there to train for the real thing on Titan.

No seriously, picture how awesome it would be to explore Titan with rovers. This place is probably the one place in the Solar system that has the most in common with our planet! The fact that it still has rivers and liquid lakes makes it so much more interesting than Mars, plus it has a thick atmosphere (5 times our atmosphere on the surface) we could probably send a UAV there or a blimp.

Re:Amazing!

[4D6963]

OK here's my idea of a fancy mission to Titan. Firstly, an orbiter around Titan, with a nice camera and the appropriate filters to see through the atmosphere like Cassini has, but also so radar thing to map the whole thing , even under its liquid lakes, and gather lots of informations about what must be Titan's unusual geology, and that would serve as a relay between Earth and the various machines on Titan. Then a lander, not necessarily a rover but that could be a plus, mainly designed to study the local geology and weather. Then a robot to explore the lakes, their chemistry, eventual currents, their depth.

And the fanciest part of all, a UAV-carrying blimp. It would float in Titan's thick atmosphere, low enough to be able to carry heavy weights (remember, on Titan a pressure of 1 Earth atmosphere is pretty high above the ground) and cover a lot of ground, provided there's some wind on Titan. It would obviously study the atmosphere, clouds, winds, chemicals composition, temperature etc extensively, but it would also be greatly placed to study the ground from very close. I said UAV-carrying, what would be more fancy than a blimp that would launch tiny UAVs that would fly around taking lots of pictures and measurements to then return to the blimp?

Tidal Lock

[MyLongNickName]

Does anyone know if Titan is in tidal lock with Saturn? Anyone know if there exists a list of which moons are in tidal lock and which aren't?

Re:Tidal Lock

[jeiler]

Yes, Titan is tidally locked. The Wikipedia article on Tidal locking may have a good list.

Re:Tidal Lock

[CheshireCatCO]

All of the medium to large satellites (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Phoebe), except Hyperion, which has a chaotic spin, and I think Phoebe, which is irregular as heck anyway. All the captured, irregular moons cannot be counted on to spin locked to the planet. The inner small moons (Pan, Daphnis, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Janus, and Epimetheus) are tidally locked according to the data.

Presentation by Carolyn Porco (Cassini) @ TED.

[Antwerp Atom]

Excellent presentation on the moons of Saturn by Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini mission imaging team at the 2007 TED conference. (video)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/carolyn_porco_flies_us_to_saturn.html

Re:goody

[IAAE]

Other than burning hydrocarbons, what would you do with them?

TFA says that theres methane, ethane and other light hydrocarbons. You can make CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs and that kind of fun stuff with methane and ethane, but to make polymers you need ethylene or other hydrocarbons with double or triple bonds.

It probably wouldn't be feasible to transport hydrocarbons from Titan back to Earth for consumption here, the energy costs alone would be astronomical; that and the whole climate change and tendancy to move away from hydrocarbons... The only thing I can see this being "useful" for is if we wanted a "refueling station" in space where we could just load up a spaceship with what is essentially natural gas. The only problem would be finding oxygen to combust it with...

Sorry to bust your dreams...

[Sique]

Before anyone comes up with the idea to mine the hydrocarbonates on Titan to overcome the oil and energy crisis on Earth, hold your breath!

The energy necessary to accelerate the mined hydrocarbonates enough to transfer them to Earth is higher than the actual energy equivalent you get by burning the hydrocarbonates. That's because you would have to accelerate the Titan-oil from 9.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Saturn) to 29.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Earth).

I see what you did there...

[postermmxvicom]

"the energy costs alone would be astronomical" ba dum tis

Re:Cheesy Joke Thread, and life on Saturn

[gsslay]

Not "invade". Sheesh, keep to the script why dontcha?!

Act 1: Locate & Destroy Secret Inter-planetary WMDs
Act 2: Er, forget that, we never said that, we meant; Liberate oppressed Saturnians
Act 3: Confuse Saturn For Something Jupiter Did - Meh, they're all gas-giants aren't they?
Act 4: Ooh, fancy that, you have oil? That we did not know.
Act 5: Damn Ungrateful Tentacle-heads

Re:So where did these hydrocarbons come from?

[hoggoth]

> I thought we've always had beaten into our heads that hydrocarbons, and oil and gas in particular were the result of decaying biomass from dinosaurs. So, where did these hydrocarbons come from? Was Titan an outpost for some spacefaring dino species, that got wiped out in a strange intergalactic plague? Or is there a much more sane, reasonable answer that I just haven't seen yet?

Q: Ethane on Titan comes from:

A. The decayed, compressed remains of Titanic Dinosaurs.
A: Xenu dropped his dinosauroid enemies into volcanos on Titan.
B: The devil planted it there to trick us
C: Solar radiation hits Methane (CH4), splitting it into (CH3+H), which quickly recombines into Ethane (C2H6)