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  Home arrow News arrow News from Space arrow feel like swimming

 
feel like swimming | Print |  E-mail
Written by staff   
Wednesday, 02 August 2006

Although images from the Huygens probe seemed to indicate the presence of lakes on Titan, a July 22 flyby by the Cassini spacecraft has provided radar imagery that seems to have clinched it: Saturn’s moon Titan is wet.“This is a big deal,” said Steve Wall, deputy radar team leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in a recent NASA statement. “We’ve now seen a place other than Earth where lakes are present.”

Due to Titan’s minus-180-degree Celsius surface temperature, the lakes are believed to be liquid methane or a methan-ethan mix. Cassini spotted several dozen lakes as small as 0.6 miles wide, with some nearly 20 miles wide. The biggest lake is roughly 62 miles long.

“What we see is darker than anything we've ever seen elsewhere on Titan. It was almost as though someone laid a bull’s-eye around the whole north pole of Titan, and Cassini sees these regions of lakes just like those we see on Earth,” said Larry Soderblom, Cassini interdisciplinary scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Ariz. “Titan has turned out to be like a musical crescendo—each pass is more exciting than the last.”

Jonathan Lunine, Cassini interdisciplinary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, is in agreement. ”We've always believed Titan’s methane had to be maintained by liquid lakes or extensive underground ‘methanofers,’ the methane equivalent of aquifers. We can’t see methanofers but we can now say we've seen lakes.”

 
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