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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 Great Lakes combined cover more surface area than any other body of fresh water on Earth. Saturn’s largest moon is Titan, second only to Ganymede, which orbits Jupiter. Like Earth, Titan has many lakes, the largest of which, Kraken Mare, covers an area only slightly smaller than all the Great Lakes together. And, like Earth, Titan has a thick atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen.
But Titan’s lakes aren’t filled with water, fresh or salty. They are filled with liquid ethane and methane. Here on Earth, we call those natural gas, but Titan’s temperature is so low, ethane and methane condense into liquids. Titan has rain, rivers, and lakes of liquid natural gas.
On Earth, wherever we find water, we find life.