Saturn’s Moon Titan has Lakes So Deep, Cassini Couldn’t Find Bottom – What’s Down There? #NASA #Saturn #space #scifi

As the data from Cassini’s study of Saturn’s moon, Titan, is studied, more is revealed. And sometimes hidden.

Atmosphere means balloons could carry probes over Titan

Data from one of the spacecraft’s last flybys of Titan, a large moon with the precursors of life’s chemistry, reveals that a huge lake on the surface called Kraken Mare is more than 1,000 feet ( 300 meters) deep. In fact, the lake is so deep that Cassini’s radar couldn’t probe all the way to the bottom. space.com

Titan is bizarre in its resemblance to Earth, but in a totally off-kilter way. Titan has a dense atmosphere of mostly nitrogen – like Earth’s atmosphere but missing the oxygen that indicates life.

Titan has liquid lakes on its surface, but not water. It’s much too cold for liquid water to exist, so the lakes are methane and ethane, “but current models suggest that the moon should cycle through all of the methane on its surface in only 10 million years, a small fraction of the 4.5-billion-year lifetime of our solar system.” So where’s the methane coming from?

Could there be life in those methane lakes? Is that even possible? Will humans ever step foot on such a profoundly cold and deadly world? NASA would like to return, perhaps with a submarine in twenty or thirty years. Until then, only imagination can take us to Titan.

Join me in a Science Fiction adventure.

Who’d want to spend the rest of their life on a shadowy world of liquid methane lakes?

Shoved into a stasis pod on a hijacked spaceship, Fynn is on his way to Titan. But any vision of utopia is doomed from the start. Under their bizarre leader, the colony erupts as factions clash. Fynn leads his outcast friends in a desperate bid to save all their lives. Click here now.

The recent study of Cassini date was published in December, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.