Earth isn’t the only place in the solar system with rivers, lakes, and seas. Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has these features too, but it’s made of liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane instead of water. Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth. new world It has been reported.
A new research paper published in Nature Communications This research provides more information about Titan’s unusual bodies of water, including waves, currents, estuaries, and fjords. It uses archived data from NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, and whose Huygens probe sent back the first images of Titan’s surface in 2005, revealing ancient dry beaches and methane rivers.
As NASA prepares to launch its Dragonfly spacecraft to Titan in 2027, getting more information about Titan’s water bodies will help with mission planning.
Titan is the most Earth-like place we know of, with an atmosphere (98% nitrogen and 2% methane), rain, ice, lakes, oceans, valleys, mountain ranges, plateaus, and sand dunes. Its landscape is dominated by vast sand dune fields, flat plains, and polar regions with vast seas and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. Titan’s surface temperature is about -290 degrees Fahrenheit (-179 degrees Celsius), and its gravity is 14 percent that of Earth’s. It receives only 1 percent of the sunlight that Earth does.
Although Titan is very different from Earth, aerial and radar images show how flows of liquid methane have shaped its surface in a way reminiscent of Earth’s.
Titan’s small lakes are more than 300 feet deep and 10 miles wide, sitting on the tops of hills and plateaus. New research using Cassini radar data on three of the polar seas—Kraken, Ligeia, and Punga Mare—is revealing more about these strange waters. The lakes contain varying levels of methane and ethane, with more methane in rivers than in seas, and waves are larger near coasts, estuaries, and fjords, suggesting the presence of tidal currents.
Previous research has shown that Titan’s rivers do not carry enough flow or sediment to form a delta but could behave like wide, fast-flowing rivers on Earth, such as the Mississippi.
NASA’s Dragonfly mission is scheduled to arrive at Titan in 2034 and will last two years. The mission will include a rotorcraft that will fly to new locations every day on Titan (16 Earth days) to collect samples of the moon’s biochemistry. It will search for biochemical signatures, investigate the moon’s active methane cycle, and explore biochemistry in the atmosphere and on the surface.
“Dragonfly is an amazing science mission that has received broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission,” said Nikki Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft beyond Earth.”
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