• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Scientists discover tropical lake on Saturn moon, could expand options for life

Status
Not open for further replies.
X

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
Tropical lakes on Saturn moon could expand options for life:

Nestling among the dunes in the dry equatorial region of Saturn's moon Titan is what appears to be a hydrocarbon lake. The observation, by the Cassini spacecraft, suggests that oases of liquid methane — which might be a crucible for life — lie beneath the moon's surface. The work is published today in Nature.

Besides Earth, Titan is the only object in the Solar System to circulate liquids in a cycle of rain and evaporation, although on Titan the process is driven by methane rather than water.

This cycle is expected to form liquid bodies near the moon's poles, but not at its dune-covered equator, where Cassini measurements show that humidity levels are low and little rain falls to the surface. "The equatorial belt is like a desert on Earth, where evaporation trumps precipitation," says astrobiologist Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Any surface liquid there should evaporate and be transported to the cooler poles, where it should condense as rain. "Lakes at the poles are easy to explain, but lakes in the tropics are not," says Caitlin Griffith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Indeed, Cassini has spotted hundreds of lakes and three seas in Titan's polar regions.

Now Griffith and her colleagues think they have found a tropical lake — some 60 kilometres long and 40 kilometres wide, and at least 1 metre deep — in Cassini observations made between 2004 and 2008. It appears as a black splotch at seven near-infrared wavelengths that can travel relatively unimpeded through the moon's thick atmosphere, which blocks visible light.

Caverns measureless to man

The team also found four smaller, brighter splotches, which Griffith says may be "shallower ponds similar to marshes on Earth, with knee-to-ankle-level depths". Because tropical lakes on Titan should evaporate over a period of just a few thousand years, the researchers argue that these ponds and lakes are being replenished by subsurface oases of liquid methane.

That would expand the number of places on the moon where life could potentially originate. Methane, which is made up of one carbon and four hydrogen atoms, is the source of more complicated organic molecules found on Titan. "There may be organic chemical processes that occur in liquid hydrocarbons that could lead to compounds analogous to proteins and information-carrying molecules," says Lunine, who was not involved in the work. "There might be a kind of life that works in liquid hydrocarbons."

Lunine and Griffith are members of a proposed NASA mission to look for such complex chemistry, called the Titan Mare Explorer (TiME). The TiME probe would spend three months bobbing around Ligeia Mare, a sea near Titan's north polar region, measuring its chemistry with a mass spectrometer.

But should that mission, the fate of which will soon be decided by NASA, land on a tropical lake instead? No, says Lunine. He points out that a number of lines of evidence — including telltale radar signatures — show that the polar regions are filled with liquid hydrocarbon lakes and seas. So far there is less evidence for the tropical features. "Something else that just happens to be dark at those wavelengths", such as a solid organic compound, might mimic a lake, he says.

Only 17% of the equatorial region's surface area has been analysed at the high resolutions required to spot these small features, but Lunine says that lower-resolution observations suggest tropical lakes are relatively few and far between. Still, the idea of oases on Titan appeals to him. "There's a place on Titan named Xanadu, and if you go back to the Coleridge poem on Xanadu, he talks about 'caverns measureless to man',” Lunine says. He adds that he would love to find such caverns filled with methane on Titan.
Click to expand...
 
F

FillerB

Member
Very, very interesting.

How unfortunate that the worlds space programs are so gutted we can't even land on the moon anymore if we wanted to.
 
F

Fusion Pizza

Member
Can we please explore more of the damn solar system? There has to be some really cool looking stuff. I want to see that tropical lake!
 
X

xbhaskarx

Member
the-sirens-of-titan.jpg
 
K

KingOfReading

Banned
In our lifetimes we'll never truly explore space to the extent that we should.

It all has to do with that aforementioned gutted space program. What a joke.
 
F

Fou-Lu

Member
Come on guys! All we need to do is reach a technological singularity, achieve immortality and then in our 'lifetimes' we could all go scuba diving in liquid methane on Titan.



.....I'm sad now. T_T
 
H

Himynameischris

Member
I hate reading stuff like this : ( I would love to be part of the generation that ventures out past our moon but it doesn't seem like it'll happen in my life time :(
 
X

XMonkey

lacks enthusiasm.
chris.trejo said:
I hate reading stuff like this : ( I would love to be part of the generation that ventures out past our moon but it doesn't seem like it'll happen in my life time :(
Click to expand...

I think Mars is a very good possibility. Unless you're like 50 or 60 right now.
 
A

Always-honest

Banned
oases of liquid methane were known on titan allready, right? edit: okay not the oases maybe..

Didn't they allready send something there? that went in to the atmosphere and stuff?

edit: oh right:

Huygens landing site

Huygens in situ image from Titan's surface—the only image from the surface of a planetary body outside the inner Solar System

Same with different data processing

On January 14, 2005, the Huygens probe landed on the surface of Titan, just off the easternmost tip of a bright region now called Adiri. The probe photographed pale hills with dark "rivers" running down to a dark plain. Current understanding is that the hills (also referred to as highlands) are composed mainly of water ice. Dark organic compounds, created in the upper atmosphere by the ultraviolet radiation of the Sun, may rain from Titan's atmosphere. They are washed down the hills with the methane rain and are deposited on the plains over geological time scales.[120]

After landing, Huygens photographed a dark plain covered in small rocks and pebbles, which are composed of water ice.[120] The two rocks just below the middle of the image on the right are smaller than they may appear: the left-hand one is 15 centimeters across, and the one in the center is 4 centimeters across, at a distance of about 85 centimeters from Huygens. There is evidence of erosion at the base of the rocks, indicating possible fluvial activity. The surface is darker than originally expected, consisting of a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice. The assumption is that the "soil" visible in the images is precipitation from the hydrocarbon haze above.

In March 2007, NASA, ESA, and COSPAR decided to name the Huygens landing site the Hubert Curien Memorial Station in memory of the former president of the ESA.[121]
Click to expand...
 
C

CiSTM

Banned
KingOfReading said:
In our lifetimes we'll never truly explore space to the extent that we should.

It all has to do with that aforementioned gutted space program. What a joke.
Click to expand...

Sufficient enough, we just need to cann all dreams about going to other planets. There is no need for those dreams since they will never come true. We need to focus on cheaper and more economy friendly satelites and robots. We need more Keplers and less Mars/Moon colony ideas.
 
N

nyong

Banned
NotTarts said:
Of couse we could, but what would we possibly gain from it?
Click to expand...
Not with the technology we have available to us. We scrapped the only rocket that can get us there. That said, we'll be going back once the next generation of rockets is built...unless those get cut too.
 
F

FStop7

Banned
Isn't Titan frequently used in sci-fi stories as a candidate for colonization and/or terraforming?

Let's get on that shit. My bags are packed.
 
R

Rapstah

Member
If I were to be instantly teleported to Titan right now and barring circumstances that would kill me instantly, would I be able to smell Titan smelling like shit because of all the methane or would there need to be another medium through which my nose could pick up the smell?
 
G

Graphics Horse

Member
Rapstah said:
If I were to be instantly teleported to Titan right now and barring circumstances that would kill me instantly, would I be able to smell Titan smelling like shit because of all the methane or would there need to be another medium through which my nose could pick up the smell?
Click to expand...

Methane doesn't smell like shit.

But aside from that, I don't know. Does the nose work at −179.5 °C ?
 
L

Lakitu

st5fu
I wish I lived in the far far future where space colonization was possible. I would sleep with an alien / girl on every planet.
 
E

endre

Member
Graphics Horse said:
You mean a manned mission? I don't know. Cassini took over 6 years.



It can't be that hard to build a pipeline to Titan.
Click to expand...

I'd just add that the trajectory of Cassini is efficient not fast. I'd still sooner want to go to Europa.

RSLYG said:
http://i.minus.com/iW5tQhXjl7LO0.jpg[IMG]

Am I doin' it right ?[/QUOTE]

The shuttle was never designed to leave Low Earth Orbit.

My humble opinion is that until we figure out some cheap way of transport to low earth orbit (for example in order to build a long range ship in the orbit of Earth), long range human missions are out of question.
Click to expand...
 
E

esquire

Has waited diligently to think of something to say before making this post
But there are too many people on Earth as it is. We'll over-populate the Earth and deplete its resources long before we can colonize another planet.
 
D

Dark Octave

Banned
You guys remember the pictures of Titan's ocean? That's still amazing to me. I wish we had more info about the space than what we have now.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

  • Locked
NASA finds evidence of life-supporting conditions on Saturn’s moon Enceladus
2 3
135
23K
Santiako replied
  • Locked
NASA: Cassini Finds Global Ocean in Saturn's Moon Enceladus
2
61
8K
BigJonsson replied
  • Locked
NASA: Cassini's Targeted Flybys and Plume Dive of Saturn's Moon Enceladus
14
3K
GulAtiCa replied
  • Locked
Ocean discovered on Enceladus, a small moon around Saturn
2 3
149
15K
Xenex replied
  • Locked
Proposed Space Boat Could Explore Lakes On Saturn's Moon Titan
35
3K
ElectricBlue187 replied
Top Bottom