Ocean May Have Been Found on Titan

This graphic and animation depicts a cross-section of the Saturnian moon Titan. Cassini scientists speculate there may be a layer of liquid water mixed with ammonia about 100 kilometers (62 miles) below the surface of Titan.

The assumption that Titan contains an internal ocean was generated from data gleaned from Cassini's Synthetic Aperture Radar during 19 separate passes over Titan between October 2005 and May 2007. Using data from the radar's early observations, the scientists and radar engineers established the locations of 50 unique landmarks on Titan's surface. They then searched for these same lakes, canyons and mountains in the reams of data returned by Cassini in its later flybys of Titan. What they found was prominent surface features seemed to shift from their expected positions by up to 31 kilometers (19 miles). Since the features could not have really moved, the apparent shift told the scientists and engineers that Titan was spinning about its axis in a previously unsuspected manner. The pre-Cassini model of Titan's spin accounted for the gravitational fields of Saturn and other nearby planets and moons but omitted other smaller less well understood effects. Since the observed spin of Titan does not fit this model, other influences, such as the seasonal changes in the motion of its atmosphere must also be important. It is difficult to explain how such relatively low energy phenomena could have such a pronounced influence on Titan's spin unless the moon's icy crust was decoupled from its core by an internal ocean. If the crust were decoupled from the core, atmospheric fluctuation alone could account the observed spin.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries.
Image credit: NASA/JPL

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Titan
• solar
• system
• Saturn
• search
• for
• water
• life
• Cassini

[crispymacoys1000]

guy below me must ether not know or forgot but thers a fourth state of mater. i mean think about it whats electricaty.

[FigBranchcom]

Yes, four states of Matter, Solid, Liquid, Gas, and Plasma. Then you also have a fifth called Bose-Einstein condensate, however this exist at such extremes it is unlikely to exist in nature since the big bang, then you have two fringe states of matter called, called super fluid and super solid. Generally speaking the science community recognizes the 4 states of matter.

[FigBranchcom]

This graphic and animation depicts a cross-section of the Saturnian moon Titan. Cassini scientists speculate there may be a layer of liquid water mixed with ammonia about 100 kilometers (62 miles) below the surface of Titan.

[ReconMasterCheif]

@RJL738 Not technically.Saturn has over a billion moons.Since moon means a sattelite and a sattelite means something orbiting another thing,and saturn has billions of asteroids floating around it or moons/sattelites,and the asteroids range from tiny pebbles to city-sized asteroids like the size of NY.

[ReconMasterCheif]

@FigBranchcom Yeah your right,but I dont think that there is any plasma on earth.I mean when planets form the somehow get plasma maybe from a asteroid or just forming it by their selfs..and does anti-matter count has another matter?Or does like say a object has anti matter in it and that is one of the four matters and it collides with matter then suddenly disseapears....?

[monk1149]

so why is science full of theories? shouldn't we send like probes to find out more about our own solar system and stuff like that. this can prove our theories, right? or is it the funds? -.-

[DSBrekus]

Fun fact: Titan is bigger then mercury.

o:

idk.

[RJL738]

Thanks for showing. Saturn has more than 60 known moons.

[mike5927652]

ginger....ginger

[jauriem]

This is true. They also say that the reason why it could be possible for water to exist in a liquid state at these extremely low temperatures is because the more concentrated the water gets with ammonia, the lower the freezing point is for water. This is an extremely cold environment. So cold in fact that water becomes a rock forming mineral at these temperatures. Methane and ethane act like water does here on earth at these temperatures, they exist in three different states: liquid, gas, solid.

[coolcatevan9]

i love titan