Saturn Probe Data Reveal Impressive Depth of Titan s Largest Sea scientificamerican.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scientificamerican.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturnâs large, foggy moon Titan â plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun.
Those are the visions that danced through my head recently. The eyes of humanity are on Mars these days. A convoy of robots, after a half-year in space, has been dropping, one after another, into orbit or straight to the ground on the Red Planet, like incoming jets at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Among the cargo is a helicopter that armchair astronauts look forward to flying over the Martian sands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/science/saturn-titan-moon-exploration.html
Clouds of methane moving across the far northern regions of Saturnâs largest moon, Titan, in 2016. Video by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Univ. of Arizona
Out There
Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titanâs Methane Seas
Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturnâs strange moon.
Clouds of methane moving across the far northern regions of Saturnâs largest moon, Titan, in 2016. Video by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Univ. of ArizonaCredit.
Feb. 21, 2021
What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturnâs large, foggy moon Titan â plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?
The largest lake on Saturn’s largest moon Titan may be deeper than a thousand feet. Even though it’s been more than three years since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finished orbiting Saturn (when it dove down into the planet’s atmosphere), experts are still finding valuable information from the data that it collected.
In one of Cassini’s last flybys of Titan (specifically, the 104
th flyby of the moon on August 21, 2014), it was able to capture significant data of the moon’s largest lake called Kraken Mare. Based on preliminary data, it was believed that the lake was at least 115 feet deep but according to more in-depth analysis, it has been revealed that it is much deeper – at least 1,000 feet. In fact, it is so deep that the radar on board the spacecraft couldn’t probe all the way down to the bottom of the lake.