NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has detected calm seas of methane gas on Saturn’s moon Titan, even though its 20-year mission to explore the planet’s vicinity ended seven years ago.
The scientific journal Nature Communications reported today that scientists from Cornell University in the United States, using Cassini radar data, have collected new information about the liquid ocean of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which consists of hydrocarbons, a class of organic chemicals made up of carbon and hydrogen. For example, this class includes chemicals such as methane and ethane.
Scientists were able to analyze the composition and “roughness” of Titan’s sea, which is located near the moon’s north pole, where they found calm seas of methane gas with a tidal current.
Titan is the largest of the 146 known moons orbiting Saturn, and the team examined observations of three of its polar seas: Kraken Mare, Ligeia Mare, and Punga Mare.
They found that the composition of the surface layers of hydrocarbon seas depends on location and latitude.
The material on the surface of the southern part of Kraken Mare was the most efficient at reflecting radar signals.
Titan’s three seas appeared calm when Cassini observed them, with the spacecraft seeing waves about 3.3 millimeters high. Where the hydrocarbon seas met the coast, the waves rose to just 5.2 millimeters, indicating weak tidal currents.
The scientists said the discovery fits with meteorological models of Saturn’s moon, which predicted that Titan’s rain is mostly methane, with small amounts of ethane and other hydrocarbons.
Cassini was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on October 15, 1997, and spent seven years traveling to Saturn, followed by 13 years orbiting the planet. During that time, it shared the wonders of Saturn and its family of icy moons with Earth before running out of fuel, after 20 years in space and ending its mission by burning up inside the planet’s atmosphere on September 15, 2017, after sending all the data back to Earth.