Latest Lakes of Titan Stories

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Part of the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan has been actively tracked by NASA’s Cassini mission for the past several years. During that time, the mission has found a remarkable presence of hydrocarbon methane lakes and seas dotting the surface of the moon. But a model developed by mission leaders at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, suggests the supply of these methane lakes will soon come to end. Of...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online New research based on observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that Titan, Saturn's largest moon, may look younger than it really is. While most moons display their age through their thousands of craters, NASA said that Titan's craters are being erased, giving it a 'Benjamin Button' appearance. "Most of the Saturnian satellites - Titan's siblings - have thousands and thousands of craters on their surface. So far on Titan,...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists at NASA's Cassini mission revealed today that blocks of hydrocarbon ice might cover the surface of existing lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbon on Saturn's moon Titan. Cassini's mixed readings from the reflectivity of the surfaces of the lakes on Titan might be explained by the presence of ice floes. "One of the most intriguing questions about these lakes and seas is whether they might host an exotic form of life," said...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online What resembles a giant hot cross bun? According to radar images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, a mysterious, nearly circular feature on Saturn's moon Titan does. The report, given at the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences conference suggests that there is also evidence of ancient shorelines. When you bake bread, sometimes the steam causes the top of the bread to lift and crack. The research team believes...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online By studying photographs of Saturn's moon Titan, researchers from a pair of US universities have discovered that the satellite's river networks caused little erosion in some areas, leading them to believe that either erosion there is exceptionally slow or that some other phenomenon wiped out older riverbeds and landforms. The research, which was conducted by experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University...

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed that Titan has a layer of liquid water under its ice shell. During their study, they saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They determined that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or solid "tides," 3 feet of height. Cassini reveled that...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered tropical lakes on Saturn's moon Titan, one of which is about half the size of Utah's Great Salt Lake. Previous models had assumed the long-standing bodies of liquid only existed at the poles on the moon, but the latest findings published in this week's issue of the journal Nature shows the methane lakes in the "tropics" of Titan. Caitlin Griffith, the paper's lead author, said that the liquid for these lakes likely...

Saturn's giant moon Titan hides behind a thick, smoggy atmosphere that's well known to scientists as one of the most complex chemical environments in the solar system. It's a productive "factory" cranking out hydrocarbons that rain down on Titan's icy surface and cloak it in soot. With a brutally cold surface temperature of around minus 270 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 170 degrees Celsius), the hydrocarbons form lakes of liquid methane and ethane. However, the most important raw ingredient in...

A new study based on data from the Cassini spacecraft suggests that a lake on one of Saturn's moons behaves similarly to the Etosha salt pan on Earth. A group led by Thomas Cornet of the Université de Nantes, France, a Cassini associate, found characteristics of Ontario Lake on Titan are similar to Etosha Pan in Namibia, Africa because it drains and refills from below. Etosha Pan is a lake bed that fills with a shallow layer of water from groundwater levels that rise during the rainy...

Researchers studying Saturn’s moon Titan -- a natural satellite roughly half of Earth’s diameter, with a thick atmosphere of methane and a surface temperature of nearly -300 degrees Fahrenheit and the only other body in our solar system that has large bodies of liquid on its surface -- have created a computer model of its atmosphere and methane cycle that, for the first time, explains how lakes and storms form and exist on the distant moon. The new model, created by researchers led by...