Posted on by Jason Major

Titan’s Tides Suggest a Subsurface Sea

Saturn’s hazy Titan is now on the short list of moons that likely harbor a subsurface ocean of water, based on new findings from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

As Titan travels around Saturn during its 16-day elliptical orbits, it gets rhythmically squeezed by the gravitational pull of the giant planet — an effect known as tidal flexing (see video below.) If the moon were mostly composed of rock, the flexing would be in the neighborhood of around 3 feet (1 meter.) But based on measurements taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, Titan exhibits much more intense flexing — ten times more, in fact, as much as 30 feet (10 meters) — indicating that it’s not entirely solid at all.

Instead, Cassini scientists estimate that there’s a moon-wide ocean of liquid water beneath the frozen crust of Titan, possibly sandwiched between layers of ice or rock.

“Short of being able to drill on Titan’s surface, the gravity measurements provide the best data we have of Titan’s internal structure.”

– Sami Asmar, Cassini team member at JPL

“Cassini’s detection of large tides on Titan leads to the almost inescapable conclusion that there is a hidden ocean at depth,” said Luciano Iess, the paper’s lead author and a Cassini team member at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. “The search for water is an important goal in solar system exploration, and now we’ve spotted another place where it is abundant.”

Although liquid water is a necessity for the development of life, the presence of it alone does not guarantee that alien organisms are swimming around in a Titanic underground ocean. It’s thought that water must be in contact with rock in order to create the necessary building blocks of life, and as yet it’s not known what situations may exist around Titan’s inner sea. But the presence of such an ocean — possibly containing trace amounts of ammonia — would help explain how methane gets replenished into the moon’s thick atmosphere.

“The presence of a liquid water layer in Titan is important because we want to understand how methane is stored in Titan’s interior and how it may outgas to the surface,” said Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini team member at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. “This is important because everything that is unique about Titan derives from the presence of abundant methane, yet the methane in the atmosphere is unstable and will be destroyed on geologically short timescales.”

The team’s paper appears in today’s edition of the journal Science. Read more on the Cassini mission site here.

Top image: artist’s concept showing a possible scenario for the internal structure of Titan. (A. Tavani). Side image: An RGB-composite color image of Titan and Dione in front of Saturn’s face and rings, made from Cassini images acquired on May 21, 2011. (NASA/JPL/SSI. Composite by J. Major.)

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Cassini Spies a Possible ‘Oasis’ on Titan

Saturn's rings lie in the distance as the Cassini spacecraft looks toward Titan and its dark region called Shangri-La, east of the landing site of the Huygens Probe. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

From a JPL press release:

New data from the Cassini spacecraft shows enduring methane lakes in the equatorial regions on Saturn’s moon Titan. Previous models of the frigid liquids on Titan’s surface showed standing bodies of liquid would only exist at the poles, but one of the newly found “tropical” lakes appears to be about half the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, with a depth of at least 3 feet (1 meter).

Where could the liquid for these lakes come from? “A likely supplier is an underground aquifer,” said Caitlin Griffith, the paper’s lead author and a Cassini team associate at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “In essence, Titan may have oases.”

Understanding how lakes or wetlands form on Titan helps scientists learn about the moon’s weather. Like Earth’s hydrological cycle, Titan has a “methane” cycle, with methane rather than water circulating. In Titan’s atmosphere, ultraviolet light breaks apart methane, initiating a chain of complicated organic chemical reactions. But existing models haven’t been able to account for the abundant supply of methane.

“An aquifer could explain one of the puzzling questions about the existence of methane, which is continually depleted,” Griffith said. “Methane is a progenitor of Titan’s organic chemistry, which likely produces interesting molecules like amino acids, the building blocks of life.”

Global circulation models of Titan have theorized that liquid methane in the moon’s equatorial region evaporates and is carried by wind to the north and south poles, where cooler temperatures cause methane to condense. When it falls to the surface, it forms the polar lakes. On Earth, water is similarly transported by the circulation, yet the oceans also transport water, thereby countering the atmospheric effects.

The latest results come from Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, which detected the dark areas in the tropical region known as Shangri-La, near the spot where the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe landed in 2005. When Huygens landed, the heat of the probe’s lamp vaporized some methane from the ground, indicating it had landed in a damp area.

Areas appear dark to the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer when liquid ethane or methane are present. Some regions could be shallow, ankle-deep puddles. Cassini’s radar mapper has seen lakes in the polar region, but hasn’t detected any lakes at low latitudes.

The tropical lakes detected by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer have remained since 2004. Only once has rain been detected falling and evaporating in the equatorial regions, and only during the recent expected rainy season. Scientists therefore deduce the lakes could not be substantively replenished by rain.

“We had thought that Titan simply had extensive dunes at the equator and lakes at the poles, but now we know that Titan is more complex than we previously thought,” said Linda Spilker, the Cassini project scientist based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “Cassini still has multiple opportunities to fly by this moon going forward, so we can’t wait to see how the details of this story fill out.”

The findings appear in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

Posted on by Jason Major

On the Edge of Titan

Titan's haze-covered limb seen by Cassini on June 6

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Here’s a quick look at one of my favorite cosmic photo subjects – the varying layers of atmosphere that enshroud Saturn’s enormous moon Titan. The image above is a color-composite made from three raw images acquired by Cassini during its latest flyby.

On June 7 Cassini approached Titan within 596 miles (959 km) and imaged portions of the moon’s northwest quadrant with its radar instrument, as well as conducted further investigations of areas near the equator where surface changes were detected in 2010.

The image here was assembled from three raw images captured in red, green and blue visible light channels. It reveals some structure in the upper hydrocarbon haze layers that extend upwards above the moon’s opaque orange clouds — reaching 400-500 km in altitude, Titan’s atmosphere is ten times thicker than Earth’s!

The June 6 flyby was the second in a series of passes that will take Cassini into a more inclined orbit, where it will reside for the next three years as it investigates Saturn’s polar regions and obtains better views of its ring system.

Read more about the flyby here.

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Composite by J. Major.

Posted on by Jason Major

A New Angle on Titan

Color-composite image of Titan and Saturn (NASA/JPL/SSI/J. Major)

Here’s a great shot of Titan and Saturn acquired by Cassini on May 6, 2012 just after a pass by the haze-covered moon. It’s a color-composite made from images taken in Cassini’s red, green and blue color channels, and the resulting image was color adjusted a bit to appear more “Saturny”.

UPDATE 7/2/12: The image above is featured in today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)… check it out here.

Cassini also made some closer passes of Titan on May 6, taking images within about 710,000 km. After recent passes of Encealdus and Dione, Cassini buzzed past Titan in preparation of a targeted flyby on May 22, after which it will head up and out out of the “moonplane” in order to get a better view of Saturn’s rings and upper latitudes.

After that, Cassini won’t be playing amongst the moons again for three years, so images like this will be a rarity for a while.

Another image of Titan, closer-in and set against Saturn’s rings and clouds, shows the fine, transparent structure of the moon’s upper atmospheric haze layers:

Created by the breakdown of methane in Titan’s opaque atmosphere by UV radiation, the haze is composed of complex hydrocarbons that extend outwards up to ten times the thickness of Earth’s atmosphere!

(The RGB layers weren’t available for this particular view, so there’s no color version of it.)

Check out previous images from Cassini’s flyby of Dione and Enceladus, and follow along with the Cassini mission on the JPL site here.

Top image: Color-composite image of Titan and Saturn (NASA/JPL/SSI/J. Major) Bottom image: Titan in blue wavelength against Saturn (NASA/JPL/SSI)

Posted on by Jason Major

African Lake Has a Twin on Titan

Titan's Ontario Lacus is found to bear a striking resemblance to Namibia's Etosha Pan. (NASA/JPL/ESA)

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A large lake on Saturn’s cloud-covered Titan seems very similar to the Etosha Pan, a salt-encrusted dry lakebed in northern Namibia that periodically fills with water. As it turns out, Titan’s “great lake” may also be temporary.

Ontario Lacus, so named because of its similarity both in shape and size to Lake Ontario here on Earth, was first discovered near the south pole of Titan by the Cassini spacecraft in 2009. Its smooth, dark appearance in radar images indicated a uniform and reflective surface, implying a large — although likely shallow — body of liquid.

Of course, on Titan the liquid isn’t water — it’s methane, which is the main ingredient of the hydrologic cycle found on the giant moon. That far from the Sun the temperatures at Titan’s poles fall to a frigid -300ºF (-185ºC), much too cold for water to exist as a liquid and so, on this world, methane has taken its place.

A research team led by Thomas Cornet of the Université de Nantes, France has taken a closer look at Cassini’s radar data of Ontario Lacus and found evidence of channels carved into the southern portion. According to the team, this likely indicates that the lakebed surface is exposed.

Cassini image of Ontario Lacus. (NASA/JPL/SSI)

“We conclude that the solid floor of Ontario Lacus is most probably exposed in those areas,” said Cornet.

In addition, sediment layers surrounding the lake suggest that the liquid level has varied.

All in all, this reveals a striking resemblance between Ontario Lacus and Namibia’s Etosha Pan — an “ephemeral lake” that is dry for much of the year, occasionally filling with a shallow layer of water which evaporates, leaving salty rings of sediment.

The inherent otherworldly nature of Etosha Pan is further underlined — and perhaps foreshadowed! — by its use as a backdrop in the 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Although Ontario Lacus was initially thought to be permanently filled with liquid hydrocarbons, the team’s findings draw a strong correlation with this well-known Earthly environment, suggesting a much more temporary nature and showing the value of comparative research.

Satellite image of Etosha Pan, acquired on April 28, 2012. (Chelys/EOSnap)

“These results emphasise the importance of comparative planetology in modern planetary sciences,” said Nicolas Altobelli, Cassini project scientist for ESA.”Finding familiar geological features on alien worlds like Titan allows us to test the theories explaining their formation.”

Read the press release from ESA here.

Image credits: Cassini radar image JPL/NASA. Envisat radar image ESA. Composite image: LPGNantes.

Posted on by Jason Major

Photo Treat: Enceladus, Titan and Saturn’s Rings

Color-composite image from Cassini raw data acquired on March 12, 2012. (NASA/JPL/SSI/J. Major)

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Little Enceladus and enormous Titan are seen on either side of Saturn’s rings in this image, a color-composite made from raw images acquired by Cassini on March 12, 2012. The original images were taken in red, green and blue color channels, and with a little Photoshop editing I combined them into a roughly true-color view of what Cassini saw as it passed within 1,045,591 km of Enceladus.

Follow along with the Cassini mission here.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Edited by Jason Major.

Posted on by Paul Scott Anderson

Cassini Takes a Closer Look at Titan’s Sand Dunes

Radar image of sand dunes on Titan. Credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/ASI/ESA and USGS/ESA

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Titan is a world that is amazingly Earth-like in some ways, with rain, rivers, lakes and seas. Mind you, the liquid in this case is methane/ethane instead of water, at the bitterly cold conditions on the surface. Also like Earth, Titan has vast sand dune fields, covering about 10 million square kilometres (39 million square miles), or 13% of Titan’s surface. The Cassini spacecraft has been studying these dunes with its radar (in order to see through the perpetually smog-like atmosphere), with interesting results.

Titan’s dunes show regional differences, although they are only found in equatorial areas, between 30°S and 30°N. They are found in both highlands and lowlands, but primarily in lower elevations. The ones at higher altitudes are thinner and more widely spaced, and the gaps between them are brighter in the radar images, which means that there is probably less sand available than at lower altitudes. The dunes also become narrower and more widely spaced at northern latitudes.

Comparison of dunes on Titan (left) with those on Earth (right). Credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/ASI/ESA and USGS/ESA

Because Titan’s southern hemisphere has shorter but more intense summers, due to Saturn’s elliptical orbit around the Sun, there is less moisture in the soil in those regions, making them more ideal for dune-forming. There is more moisture in the northern regions, where most of the lakes and seas are found.

“As one goes to the north, the soil moisture probably increases, making the sand particles less mobile and, as a consequence, the development of dunes more difficult,” said Dr. Le Gall of LATMOS-UVSQ in Paris.

The characteristics of Titan’s dunes also provide clues to the moon’s climate and geological history.

According to Nicolas Altobelli, Cassini–Huygens project scientist, “Understanding how the dunes form as well as explaining their shape, size and distribution on Titan’s surface is of great importance to understanding Titan’s climate and geology. As their material is made out of frozen atmospheric hydrocarbons, the dunes might provide us with important clues on the still puzzling methane/ethane cycle on Titan, comparable in many aspects with the water cycle on Earth.”

It should also be noted that the sand on Titan is composed of solid hydrocarbons instead of silicates like sand on Earth. Similar in appearance, but like the rest of Titan, very different in composition. They are reminiscent of the dune fields in Namibia or southern Arabia, but are much larger – they average about 1-2 kilometres (0.6-1.2 miles) wide, 100 metres (328 feet) tall and extend for hundreds of kilometres/miles!

It would be interesting to see a Titanian version of Lawrence of Arabia…

Posted on by Paul Scott Anderson

Titan’s Layered Atmosphere is Surprisingly Earth-Like

Titan's thick, smog-like upper atmosphere obscures our view of the lower atmosphere and surface. The much smaller moon Enceladus is also seen in this image. Credit: NASA/JPL

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Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is in some ways the most Earth-like world in the solar system, with a thick nitrogen atmosphere, rain, rivers, lakes and seas. Albeit it is much colder, and liquid methane/ethane takes the place of water, but the hydrological processes are quite similar to those here. There may, however, also be a liquid water-ammonia ocean below the surface. Now, new research suggests that Titan is Earth-like in another way as well, with a layered lower atmosphere similar to ours.

It’s been long known that Titan has a dense atmosphere; you can’t even see the surface due to a thick smog-like upper haze composed of hydrocarbons. As it turns out, the lower atmosphere has two distinct layers; the lowest layer, like on Earth, is known as the boundary layer, which has the most influence on climate and weather.

There has been a lot of uncertainty about the nature of Titan’s lower atmosphere, so scientists developed a 3-D climate model to try to answer those questions – previous data from Voyager 1, Cassini and Huygens had led to conflicting results. This was largely due to the fact that the lower atmosphere can’t be observed directly because of the opaque upper atmosphere. The new climate model shows that there are two lower layers which are distinct from each other as well as from the upper atmosphere. The lowest boundary layer is about 800 metres (2,600 feet) thick while the next layer is about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep.

According to Paulo Penteado from the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Science at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, “The most interesting point is that their model shows the presence of two different boundaries, the lower one caused by the daily heating and cooling of the surface – and varying in height during the day – and the higher one caused by the seasonal change in global air circulation.”

Benjamin Charnay from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris and lead author of the study, adds: “This unprecedented organisation of the boundary layer has several consequences. It controls the atmospheric circulation and wind patterns in the lower atmosphere; it controls the size and spacing of dunes on Titan; it could imply the formation of boundary layer clouds (of methane on Titan). Such clouds seem to have been observed but not explained.”

These differences are surprising, since Titan receives far less solar energy from the Sun than Earth does. This solar insulation, which determines temperature variations in the atmosphere, is 1,000 times weaker on Titan than on Earth. Such a dynamic atmosphere on Titan was unexpected, but it may hold clues as to the formation of our own atmosphere. This could also be extrapolated to exoplanets; if a smaller world so far from the Sun can have unanticipated Earth-like conditions, how many exoplanets, now being discovered by the thousands, could as well?

The findings were published in the January 15, 2012 issue of Nature Geoscience.

From the abstract:

“We conclude that Titan’s troposphere is well structured, featuring two boundary layers that control wind patterns, dune spacing and cloud formation at low altitudes.”

The abstract and article are here. The full article is available for $18.00 US or by subscription to Nature Geoscience.

Posted on by Jason Major

A Balanced Budget on Titan

Titan and Dione seen on December 10, 2011 by the Cassini spacecraft. (NASA/JPL/SSI/J. Major)

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It’s been said many times that the most Earthlike world in our solar system is not a planet at all, but rather Saturn’s moon Titan. At first it may not seem obvious why; being only a bit larger than the planet Mercury and coated in a thick opaque atmosphere containing methane and hydrocarbons, Titan sure doesn’t look like our home planet. But once it’s realized that this is the only moon known to even have a substantial atmosphere, and that atmosphere creates a hydrologic cycle on its surface that mimics Earth’s – complete with weather, rain, and gully-carving streams that feed liquid methane into enormous lakes – the similarities become more evident. Which, of course, is precisely why Titan continues to hold such fascination for scientists.

Now, researchers have identified yet another similarity between Saturn’s hazy moon and our own planet: Titan’s energy budget is in equilibrium, making it much more like Earth than the gas giant it orbits.

A team of researchers led by Liming Li of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Houston in Texas has completed the first-ever investigation of the energy balance of Titan, using data acquired by telescopes and the Cassini spacecraft from 2004 to 2010.

Energy balance (or “budget”) refers to the radiation a planet or moon receives from the Sun versus what it puts out. Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune emit more energy than they receive, which indicates an internal energy source. Earth radiates about the same amount as it receives, so it is said to be in equilibrium… similar to what is now shown to be the case for Titan.

Blue hazes hover high above thicker orange clouds over Titan's south pole (NASA/JPL/SSI)

The energy absorption and reflection rates of a planet’s – or moon’s! – atmosphere are important clues to the state of its climate and weather. Different balances of energy or changes in those balances can indicate climate change – global cooling or global warming, for instance.

Of course, this doesn’t mean Titan is a balmy world. At nearly 300 degrees below zero (F) it has an environment that even the most extreme Earth-based life would find inhospitable. Although Titan’s atmosphere is ten times thicker than Earth’s its composition is very different, permitting easy passage of infrared radiation (a.k.a. “heat”) and thus exhibits an “anti-greenhouse” effect, unlike Earth or, on the opposite end of the scale, Venus.

Still, some stable process is in place on Saturn’s moon that allows for distribution of solar energy across its surface, within its atmosphere and back out into space. With results due in from Cassini from a flyby on Jan. 2, perhaps there will soon be even more clues as to what that may be.

Read more about Earth’s changing energy budget here.

The team’s report was published in the AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters on December 15, 2011. Li, L., et al. (2011), The global energy balance of Titan, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L23201, doi:10.1029/2011GL050053.

Posted on by Lillian Ortiz

AVIATR: An Airplane Mission for Titan

An artist's conception of AVIATR, an airplane mission to Saturn's largest moon Titan. Credit: Mike Malaska 2011

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It has been said that the atmosphere on Titan is so dense that a person could strap a pair of wings on their back and soar through its skies.

It’s a pretty fascinating thought. And Titan – Saturn’s largest moon – is a pretty fascinating place. After all, it’s the only other body in our solar system (besides Earth, of course) that has that type of atmosphere and evidence of liquid on its surface.

“As far as its scientific interest, Titan is the most interesting target in the Solar System,” Dr. Jason W. Barnes of the University of Idaho told Universe Today.

That’s why Barnes and a team of 30 scientists and engineers created an unmanned mission concept to explore Titan called AVIATR (Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance). The plan, which primarily consists of a 120 kg plane soaring through the natural satellite’s atmosphere, was published online late last month.

The goal of the plane concept – which according to Barnes can serve as a standalone mission or as part of a larger Titan-focused exploration program – is to study the moon’s geography (its mountains, dunes, lakes and seas), as well as its atmosphere (the wind, haze, clouds and rain. Did you know that Titan is the only other place is our solar system where it rains?)

AVIATR is composed of three vehicles: one for space travel, one for entry and descent into Titan, and a plane to fly through the atmosphere. AVIATR, estimated to cost $715 million, would not prevent other missions from occurring on Titan, Barnes said. Instead, it would supplement the science being done by other projects.

“The science that AVIATR could do complements the science that can be accomplished from both orbiting and landed platforms,” the article stated.

Unfortunately, it seems like the plane concept won’t be happening anytime soon.

That’s because Titan didn’t make the National Research Council’s “Decadal Survey” – a prioritization of future planetary missions. (Read more about the survey in this Universe Today post.)

“Titan was deferred to another decade,” Barnes said.

But, he hopes to continue to build support for AVIATR so that it can get onto the next decadal survey in 2020. “We certainly had a lot of interest from people. We are breaking the paradigm that a balloon was the right way to go to Titan,” Barnes said.

So, why send an unmanned plane to study Titan’s atmosphere?

“Titan is the best place to fly an airplane in the whole solar system. We can go when and where we want,” Barnes said, adding that when compared to Earth, there’s four times more air and seven times less gravity on Titan. “A balloon is stuck in the wind.”

According to the article:

“A balloon entrained in primarily zonal winds near the equator would have no mechanism by which to travel to the polar regions to observe lakes and shoreline processes. Even if it were possible to get there, it is not clear that it would be desirable to send a balloon to the poles where Titan’s most violent meteorological activity takes place. AVIATR is both able to fly to the poles and is sufficiently robust to survive there.”

Mission poster for AVIATR. Credit: Mike Malaska

There’s also this issue: A shortage of plutonium-238.

“The radioactive decay of plutonium-238 provides the heat that powers RTGs, which can power spacecraft where there is insufficient sunlight for solar panels to operate. NASA is presently investing in a new type of RTG, called the ASRG,” the article stated. “A traditional hot-air balloon will not work on Titan with an ASRG owing to its lower heat production. In contrast, the AVIATR mission is specifically enabled by the use of ASRGs. The power density (in Watts per kilogram) and longevity of the ASRG allow an electrically-powered aircraft to fly on Titan.”

A plane could also find potential landing spots for future exploration. And, “since we are flying, we fly west the whole time so we can stay on the day side of Titan,” Barnes said.

That daylight would also help AVIATR collect photographic data during its travels and, according to Barnes, when it’s time to downlink that information, the plane would conserve energy by gliding through the air.

“And in doing so, we can also sample of bunch of altitude ranges,” Barnes said. “We are sampling the whole time.”

The plan seems interesting enough, but it’ll be quite a while before any data from the prospective mission would be coming back to Earth. If the plan is accepted (the earliest being 2020), the project would still have to be built, then once completed it would take 7 1/2 years to reach Titan. Once there, the mission would take about a nominal Earth year to study.

“I now realize that it’s a career-long project,” Barnes said to Universe Today. “The plan at this point is to keep this in the forefront of people’s minds and take whatever new ideas that people suggest and try to improve its prospect for selection.

To view the complete proposal, published in Experimental Astronomy, go here.