Titan’s seas should be deep enough for a robotic submarine to wade through, a new paper explains. This should help pave the way towards our exploration of Titan’s depths.
Radar map of the polar region of Saturn’s moon Titan. Image credits NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Fancy a dip? Who doesn’t. But if you ever find yourself on Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, you should stay away from swimming areas. A new paper reports that the Kraken Mare, the largest body of liquid methane on the moon’s surface is at least 1,000 feet deep near its center, making it both very deep and very cold.
In the distant future, a billion miles from Earth, like a 21st-Century version of Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a robotic, motor-less NASA submarine facsimile of Verne’s Nautilus, will probe the depths of Kraken Mare, the largest lake on Saturn’s, Earthlike moon, Titan, shrouded in a golden haze of gaseous nitrogen. This immense 1000-foot-deep body of methane is nearly the size of all five Great Lakes combined.
“The depth and composition of each of Titan’s seas had already been measured, except for Titan’s largest sea, Kraken Mare – which contains about 80% of the moon’s surface liquids,” said Valerio Poggiali, research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science (CCAPS) referring to findings in the data from Cassini’s T104 flyby of Titan on Aug. 21, 2014 –one of the mission’s final Titan flybys.
Far below the gaseous atmospheric shroud on Saturn s largest moon, Titan, lies Kraken Mare, a sea of liquid methane. Cornell University astronomers have estimated that sea to be at least 1,000-feet deep near its center - enough room for a potential robotic submarine to explore.
An artistic rendering of Kraken Mare, the large liquid methane sea on Saturn’s moon Titan. Astronomers estimate Titan’s largest sea is 1,000 feet deep
January 20, 2021
Far below the gaseous atmospheric shroud on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, lies Kraken Mare, a sea of liquid methane. Cornell astronomers have estimated that sea to be at least 1,000 feet deep near its center – enough room for a potential robotic submarine to explore.
After sifting through data from one of the final Titan flybys of the Cassini mission, the researchers detailed their findings in “The Bathymetry of Moray Sinus at Titan’s Kraken Mare,” which published Dec. 4, 2020, in the Journal of Geophysical Research.