 One, we're back with live one o'clock rock with Manoa. What happens in Manoa? Research happens in Manoa. That's why our show at one o'clock rock on a Monday is research in Manoa R.I.M. We love this show and today an old-time guest a guest who's been here many times Peter McGinnis Mark a researcher director of the NASA Pacific Regional Planetary Data Center at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. What a mouthful. Wow. I can do it. I know I can do it And we're talking today about this is very exotic the methane lakes of Titan. Yes, you're gonna learn something new today, Jay Do you even know where Titan is or what Titan really is? It's a moon of Jupiter. Well close If we take a look at the first slide Titan is a moon of Saturn. Oh Saturn. Oh, I and Recognize still fast, of course not yet Recognize that Saturn is one of the four giant gas giant planets You can see here in this mosaic which was taken way back in the late 70s by the Voyager spacecraft Saturn is the planet with these wonderful rings It's got some fascinating moons associated with it. We only have time today to talk about one of them But in the field of view you see rare There's another small one called Enceladus with geysers made of water vapor The little small one which looks like the Death Star is mined us and then after the top right that is Titan And that is the focus of today's presentation. This is a photograph. This is a computer montage So the moons weren't all in the appropriate positions So when the Voyager 2 spacecraft went by in 79 We were able to take images of individual satellites and then this has been Montage Photoshop together, but if we go on to the second slide, we will see This is the topic of today's discussion. We're gonna talk about Titan, which is the orange fuzzy ball in the middle Yes, and this is drawn to scale with Earth's moon on the right-hand side and And the largest moon in the solar system, which is called Ganymede, which I told you was I thought was a Place in Scotland. Yeah, it could well be but it's also the largest moon in the solar system And it's a moon of Jupiter, right? So we won't deal with Ganymede today or with Earth's moon But this image shows first of all the relative sizes Yes, so Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system, but it's unique for a couple of these jury has a question How big is big? You know are these relative moons big and miles or kilometers? All right So our moon is about the same size diameter as an airplane flight from San Francisco to Washington, DC Okay, so that thousand miles It's about three thousand miles. Okay, so if we were to see the the scale drawing or scale pictures You can get some idea that Titan is about 4,500 miles across a conference or cross diameter diameter not circumference But Titan is unique in the solar system in that it is the only moon in our solar system That has an atmosphere or a thick atmosphere at least it's so thick in fact that it's twice as dense as the Earth's atmosphere and it's made of a wonderful mixture of hydrocarbon So it's got methane and ethane in the atmosphere and you can you can tell from the picture because you can look the the spectral Imaging of the atmosphere will tell you The composition of the atmosphere and we know from those measurements. It's predominantly Methane and ethane and a few other exotic hydrocarbon, so it's not oxygen and nitrogen like Earth's atmosphere Yes, but the other thing about Titan is that it's really really cold So it's so cold its surface temperature is about minus 180 degrees centigrade so that's probably about minus 300 degrees fan It's not easy to get around there. And so you've got this wonderful world It's got a higher gravity than Earth's moon It's got a thick atmosphere and it's got a whole series of exotic Chemistry's in the atmosphere as well. Yes, but why does it have an atmosphere like that? What happened as opposed to what happened on the moon or on the Jupiter? What a great question? Funny you should ask One of the things which the people in my group at the university actually study is early solar system processes What are the building blocks of our solar system? How did the planets condense? At various distances away from the Sun Why do we have rocky planets like Venus Earth and Mars close into the Sun and these gas giants? Further out and then even further out the dwarf planets like Pluto and partly is to do with the temperature as The early Sun started to collapse and produce the solar system you had the heavier elements iron and silicate rock condensing first because they've got a What a higher freezing temperature so that these rocks were the first ones to form and then Only when you went further out from the Sun Did you have the really cold temperatures that would enable not only? These exotic hydrocarbons, but also water ice to be condensed So we've got the gas giants made predominantly out of hydrogen helium and their moons made out of water ice whereas close into the solar system we have rocky planets and Rocky moons like our own moon and the moons of some question now Does that mean that the material in a given object will determine its relative proximity to the Sun and to other materials? It means that if you were to look at any given distance away from the Sun You can be fairly confident. You could say what the planets and their moons are most likely to be made of and Some of the other talks we've given over the last year or so where we're looking at the comets for example Or Pluto which is a dwarf planet there in very eccentric orbits around the Sun so we're trying to put that piece of the puzzle together But basically the big gas giant planets Jupiter sat in Uranus and Neptune Had to form further away from the Sun because they're made of volatile materials like hydrogen helium and water ice and that sort of thing There's some kind of relationship. There's definitely a relationship But over the age of the solar system over the last 4.5 4.5 billion years the actual distances that each one of the planets is from the Sun could have changed because that they've Seeded or got closer to the Sun so that the solar system hasn't remained fixed in its present Configuration it has evolved over a period of time would expect that because everything is in motion and the Gravitational attraction say of Jupiter has been a major contributor to say the the positions of Mars and Earth as well as It's thrown all of the asteroid belt and some of the comets into disarray over the ages so excited It's wonderful before you move on though. I need to know something that you've mentioned it before What is this with dwarf planet? Pluto do you say was put Pluto is a what is it dwarf Pluto is a dwarf planet is bad nutrition or something like that Yeah, and basically it wasn't being fed by enough of these proto-planetismals as we call them To build up a very big rocky planet. So Pluto is a much smaller planet There's an asteroid or another dwarf planet called Ceres Which is also quite small, but it's a different designation and we have that classification now because Way out beyond the orbit of Pluto There are tens if not hundreds of other bodies of this solar system in this solar system in Places called the Kuiper belt for example You why PR? Yeah Well, we we know that there are other objects the size of Pluto or a little bit bigger than Pluto But instead of being 40 times the distance Pluto is from the Sun These objects might be 60 80 a hundred times further out and they take Thousands of years to go around the Sun once are they dense is a dwarf now The Kuiper belt we do not know for sure The new horizon spacecraft is likely to fly past another one of these Kuiper belt objects probably in 2019 so we'll start to see what the composition and also the shape and what surface history they've had later on Okay, all right. Let's go back. We're gonna get on to meet it. All right So let's go on to the third slide, please and I want to show some results from a European space mission called the Huygens probe Huygens landed on the surface of Titan back in 2004 In the lower left-hand side of this picture you can see the actual probe being assembled In some space laboratory in Europe back in the late 1990s. This is automated and not a person It's automated. You don't want to send people out to Saturn Not only is it a long journey, but also, you know, they they come they don't come back Huygens was carried to The vicinity of Saturn by the Cassini spacecraft, which was a US spacecraft Which is still in orbit around Saturn right now collecting lots of data but one of the main things about the Huygens probe was that as it was Descending through the very very thick atmosphere of Titan. It was able to take photographs It electronic images and the next slide Go off that am I right doesn't doesn't that seen in the laboratory with the fellows in the white outfits and everything Doesn't that remind you of a McDonald's laboratory kitchen? It looks like a big Mac in there Doesn't that look like a big Mac? Not really although I don't really like hamburgers, but still it's certainly an object, you know about the same size as this table and You know a sophisticated piece of equipment Okay, and as you can see it was lowered to the surface of Titan by a parachute and For the first time we were able to peer beneath the cloud deck and actually see what the surface What is the device that's over in the right hand from the bottom? What are the bottom? That that is actually the Huygens probe landed on the surface. So without the parachute without the parachute So they would jettison the parachute during the terminal phase of landing so that yeah Just by chance the parachute could have landed on top of the lander the lander was taking images When it was on the surface, so you really don't want to have any Possibility of it being affected. Yeah, I'm a parachute. Yeah by the parachutes. Okay next one and the next slide will show This is a view taken from the Huygens probe as it was descending through the atmosphere of Titan On the right hand side, we've got a color mosaic Which basically shows? What turned out to be a coastline? The core that we had no knowledge of what the surface of Titan was before Huygens went there and on the left hand side in black and white we've got a Set of three images which is showing this coastline Which is sort of running from left center to top right and then that black squiggly line is Actually a river valley and and this kind of observation was absolutely Unexpected because it turns out that Titan has a very similar Set of processes to the ones which we see here on the earth and the cutting of the river valley and we're all familiar with Clouds we're familiar with rain that rain fall when it lands on the surface It's the same kind of thing except at a temperature of minus 180 degrees centigrade and instead of water The liquid is liquid methane. All right, so we are seeing something which is called a hydrologic system by meteorologists or earth scientists, you know, if Titan has a hydrologic system just like the earth except everything is Liquid methane as opposed to liquid water and the cloud was a cloud Yes, it's methane glass and the rain is liquid methane and it Falls on the ground and it scours the surface and then it drains down to the Low points on the moon and it forms lakes and these lakes Dynamics methane the same kind of gas that it smells bad if you're near a dairy a dairy farm Sure. Yes. Yeah. Yeah And on that happy note, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna take a break. Think about it. Okay You're watching think tech Hawaii Hawaii's leading digital media platform for civic engagement Raising public awareness on tech energy diversification and globalism great content for Hawaii from think tech Hi, I'm Ethan Allen host of likeable science on think tech Hawaii I hope you'll join me each Friday afternoon as we explore the amazing world of science We bring on interesting guests scientists from all walks of life from all walks of science To talk about the work they do why they do it and more or why it's interesting to you What the science really means to your life its impacts on you how it's shaping the world around you and why you should care about it I do hope to join me every Friday at 2 p.m. For likeable science Okay, here we are it's a hundred and eighty degrees Minus 180 degrees centigrade correct. It's really cold here on Titan And we're trying to examine exactly how the gas works on Titan Some people say it smells just like methane because it is methane. That's correct But the consequence of all this liquid methane falling on the landscape of Titan has produced some really interesting Landforms and in our next slide we will see We have a radar system in orbit around Titan. All right, so on the left-hand side We're looking down on the North Pole of Titan. That's in the middle of the bullseye and These orange stripes that we see are the radar images as the spacecraft goes past The brown color is just dry land on Titan But the blue areas it turns out that there are lakes Which are the same size as Lake Superior or Lake, Michigan in the continental United States and what you can see blue is filled lakes and the White blue and the gray are intermediate and empty lakes. So these are dynamic Phenomenon and on these aren't really the colors Computer rendition, okay, and it's purely done to distinguish so liquids from solids Yeah now the other thing is that you know though you have certain stripes over there you've that they thought that the Satellite is caught as it goes around the planet quite but other parts have not have been missed And that means that the satellite hasn't been able to take a picture. That's right And I misspoke when I said that there is a spacecraft in orbit around Titan It's actually in orbit around Saturn. Okay. All right, so on each orbit around Saturn The spacecraft might actually encounter Titan once or twice Per Earth year so that we don't have a complete global. That's why it's irregular That's why it's the spacecraft is not going around Titan. It's going around Saturn It's going around Saturn catches catch can and it's they try and plan the orbits around Saturn So that every time they will encounter Titan or one of the other moons this moon and celadus is fabulous because it's got ongoing water Volcanism for example, so it's a competition for where do you collect the data Titan Saturn self or in celadus? And so you get little little is you can collect it for more places if we go back to the Slide that was on we can see on the right-hand side. This is a perspective view The dark blue here are the liquid lakes and the light of blue are the the partially infill ones and the thing about Titan is that it not only has this Hydrologic system, but it also is affected season to season So just as Earth cools down in winter and warms up during the summer the lakes on Titan change They are bigger during the summer and they're smaller during winter and it takes Saturn about 12 Earth-years to go once round the Sun so we're seeing this climatological of the changing climate on Titan Being displayed by a distribution of the lake Why is that that's so interesting is it mean that it's not a perfect axis that the axis is changing as the moon That's like the moon the moon is tilted With respect to what's called the plane of the ecliptic all the planets are in a flat disc Yeah, as they go around the Sun. Yeah, but as with Earth, which is tilted at 23 and a half degrees Earth is tilted. Yeah, Titan is also tilt and that gives it that gives it the seasons how interesting So that really in this solar system any planet Has this this disparity this right this tilt and the real cool one is the planet Uranus Which is tilted at about 65 degrees bigger seasons unbelievable seasons so that sometimes the season is different from you know a Fairies by a few Earth-years. It's nighttime and it's winter or it's daytime, and it's summer And it's but there's no solid surface on Uranus Ogles the mind doesn't it well get this all right so go so We've got these radar images of methane lakes on Titan. We know that they are changing all right if we go to the next slide This is a high-resolution radar image of a lake on Titan called Kraken All right, and the scale bar there that's about 50 miles You're a CK EN. Yes. Yes. All right. It's from Jason and the Argonauts, right? And the dark areas are the liquids and the lighter browns of the land All right, and we know that this is a liquid surface because down at the bottom right hand corner We've got another image taken from the Cassini spacecraft Looking back almost towards the Sun you see that little red and white dot subsection subsection that sunglint Off of the surface of this lake so that we know it's super smooth and we can study there We go that is sunglint from our son all the way Yeah From orbit of Saturn, and we're looking at some of these lakes It's the lakes reflect the Sun just as a mirror would do or or if you're flying in an airplane Towards the mainland and you look out in the direction, and there's a bright spot on the ocean And you can tell what the wind speeds are like on these lakes because rather than being just a single point of light It's spread out and that's because there's got waves on the surface. So as with the earth You've got weather that is affecting the surface of these lakes And you want one more surprise? This is fabulous. All right, the final slide next slide will show us Not only can we figure out What the surface area is and what the wind speed is from the waves this combined image and the top shows another one of these radar images and You might just be able to see going from left to right. We've got a That a pair of dashed red lines and the solid red lining That is what's called the grounds track of the spacecraft And the spacecraft has a radar that's looking straight down. It's called an altimeter At the bottom What we're seeing is the strength of that radar altimeter signal and What is apparent is that you can detect not only the surface of this methane lake But you can also measure how deep it is The radar signal passes through the liquid and then gets reflected back off the bottom So it's only one reflection and it's only the bottom of the lake There's a reflection from the top and there's a reflection two reflections one from the top surface And the other one from the the floor of the lake So we can figure out how deep these lakes are we have great knowledge on what the volume of material is and We can see it sloshing around see it move Well, you can make measurements because Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn for the last 12 years Compare one picture against another can compare one picture to another and you can get some idea of what the currents are this is Unbelievable you've got a whole Marine environment on Saturn's moon Titan which is very similar to the earth But it's a colder temperatures and it's made of completely different stuff And it's eroding the landscape to produce these river valleys and it's just a marvelous place to go and study You can learn so much, you know You know, like whatever these instruments can find you can take them a step further So I find something more that's like else That's what exploration is all about because yeah, we try to build a whole series of models This slide here shows some hypothetical models of the way that Titan's lakes work and you've got methane going into the atmosphere with hydrogen and nitrogen and It starts raining, but only if you send spacecraft Either in orbit around Saturn with a radar or the Huygens probe down to the surface Can we really discover these amazing things because there being some Speculation in the past that there would be perhaps precipitation out of the atmosphere But to my knowledge nobody was Speculating there will be liquid oceans or giant lakes the size of Lake Superior I mean, this is just the way you have that unless temperature is really low has to be really low and you have to have the thick atmosphere But given everything else you're starting to get Weather and climate and all of the erosional processes, you know, like people are studying the shapes of the river valleys Trying to see if they're young or whether they've been there for a long period of time and a variety of things related to how The the liquid sloshes around in the in the middle of the lake You know to say what the currents are what the wind speed is is how the meteorology is influencing These lakes, I mean this really sounds interesting, but you know what you know what strikes me is that? This can teach us more About the processes that are happening here on earth because it's a sort of a common denominator For not only oxygen and hydrogen and all that nitrogen But for all kinds of gases and materials that's how we learn more about what's happening in a nurse No, what one can take the comparison in a variety of directions The the geomorphic process of eroding landscape and forming lakes is one you can look at the chemistry You know what would earth be like if it was further away from the Sun and much much colder for example We can also compare The different moons of Jupiter and Saturn Titan is one good example, but there are other moons made out of rockers other moons made out of ice and So the more we explore the solar system particularly the outer solar system The more we learn about sort of what the variety is and that's really important Not only for our solar system, but we're now starting to explore and discover Many hundreds of planets outside our solar system. They're called exoplanets and As we explore our own solar system. We realize there's such a huge diversity of The way things look and the way the geologic processes and the chemical processes operate that we're really starting to Get a better feel for what might exist on planets around other stars And this must take you away from from life as we know it I mean, you know to dwell in this land of you know Years and years of travel in space and you know new phenomenon with that You know with the same periodic table and things you never saw or imagined before and then to have to choose Whether you want rice Krispies or cornflakes and breakfast at all Taking away from Everyday life. Yes, I certainly wouldn't watch as much TV if you know if that was what you're hinting at But yeah, it's just a fabulous place. I know God's creation is just wonderful in terms of its diversity everywhere we look it's something new it's something exciting and Developing the technology and training students to take the next step forwards is really really wonderful I envy I envy them and I envy you and you know, it almost seems It seems terrible to have to come to an end of this discussion Peter Well, I'm sure we'll come back and talk about something else We'll just back in you know to the real for the earth world. That's right See what it's like. Oh, okay. Oh boring, you know, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Oh boring. I'd rather be up there Thank you so much. You're welcome research in the north