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NASA may have failed to prove there's an underground ocean on Saturn's moon Enceladus, but now scientists claim they've found outstanding new evidence that there may be a vast ocean under the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. In this newly released image, Titan peeks out from behind Saturn while another moon, Tethys, streaks past the planet's shadowy rings. Click through for a gorgeous Titan gallery.
Scientists began to suspect a global ocean when they saw some landmarks on Titan had shifted up to 19 miles between October 2004 and May 2007. The best explanation is a vast ocean, separating the planet's icy crust from its rocky center. The Cassini Space probe will fly within 620 miles of Titan, sample the atmosphere, and take pictures of the site where the Huygens probe landed.
Comments
Mission Control: No. No, Mav, this is not a good idea.
Maverick: Sorry Goose, but it's time to buzz a tower.
Yeeehaww!
We're picking up an image. Looks like a blonde in a weird pink bikini.
This is still intra-stellar, i need interstellar!
@TommySez: the ctc on that one is infinite
This is just so cool! I can hardly wait when they have robotic rovers on the surface of Titan and Europa. Those two moons got to have some really weird geology and maybe, just maybe, the remotest possibilities for alien organisms.
cheese puffs!
I am geeky enough that I cried when I first saw the pictures from Huygens. Pictures! From one of Saturn's moons! Mind-blowing and utterly fantastic.
Thought I'd add a little more space porn. Titan, from a different perspective:
Nice, Gopherit. Is the un-detailed area on the Saturn side?
@rikchik: You know, I'm not sure. I don't believe so. I think it has to do with the dynamics of Cassini's orbit relative to Titan. They are in some sort of near-resonance, where Titan is very nearly in the same position in it's orbit every time Cassini has an encounter with it. Since Titan is nearly tidally locked with Saturn, the area where there's little data is experiencing Titan night every time there's an encounter. Other maps exist with a little more detail of that whole globe, and some additional area covered, thanks to minor course corrections over the mission, but I believe they won't be able to get good data of that one octant unless they do a major orbital maneuver.
I had thought it was completely tidally locked, like all large moons.
@rikchik: Nope. That's what this big news is about. The RADAR instrument on Cassini looked at the same area on Titan 3 years apart. Making the assumption that Titan was completely tidally locked to Saturn, they mapped the later RADAR swath onto the globe with the swath from 2004. They saw that there were shifts between surface features. Their explanation for this was both that Titan has a slight rotational obliquity (like ~3 degrees) and that Titan rotates slightly faster (?) than synchronous rotation.....it's off from being tidally locked by 0.36 degrees/year. There are several proposed explanations for this, but the one the RADAR scientists feel fits best is that Titan's atmosphere, which rotates faster than Titan itself due to seasonal atmospheric effects, exchanges angular momentum with Titan's surface....basically pushing it along, just a small amount. If Titan's crust is "decoupled" (a fancy way of saying not directly connected to) from Titan's core by a subsurface ocean, the transfer of angular momentum from the atmosphere to the surface can "push" Titan's surface slightly faster than synchronous rotation.
If you're bored and have access to the Science website, you can read the published article here:
[www.sciencemag.org]
Or, you can find it at your local library here:
Science 21 March 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5870, pp. 1649 - 1651
I still want to think of this as a tidally locked planet with moving surface features but maybe I need to give that up :)
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