p2pnet.net OT News:- A “cold landscape carved by winds and perhaps puddled with organic lakes“.

That’s how scientists analysed data captured by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft as it passed Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, on October 26, says Nature, going on:

“The take-home message, although preliminary, is that Titan may be sculpted by fierce winds and cradle vast lakes of organic chemicals. ‘It’s an extremely dynamic and active place,” says planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona, Tucson. ‘It’s a tremendous revelation’.”

Images, radar pulses and radio signals flooding to Earth from Titan are intriguing scientists who try to figure out what the strange information means, says a San Franscico Chronicle story, continuing:

“Do chains of linked methane lakes mark regions of Titan’s surface? Are there surface layers of slushy water ice mixed with some kind of chemical antifreeze that erupted from Titan’s interior? What kind of organic molecules create the swaths of streaky clouds seen in Titan’s upper atmosphere, which are driven by gentle winds blowing at barely more than 10 miles per hour?”

The Huygens probe is scheduled to, “parachute down through Titan’s atmosphere and – hopefully – land safely on the giant moon’s surface, where – hopefully again – its radio will work, however briefly, and signal home to tell what Huygens’ instruments have found,” says the story.

Titan’s surface looks like a cracked eggshell according to NASA images taken when the $3.27 billion Cassini-Huygens spacecraft zoomed within 730 miles of the haze-shrouded moon, capturing the closest-ever view of Titan, says USA Today, adding:

“Titan is one of only four known worlds (including Earth) with a rocky core, an atmosphere and climate.”

The NASA image (top right) shows Titan data from the passive radiometer mode of Cassini’s radar instrument overlaid onto a visible-light image mosaic from the spacecraft’s imaging science subsystem, says the NASA site, going on:

“The contours and colors show Titan’s radiation at microwave wavelengths (about two centimeters or 0.79 inch), while the light and dark shading is from the optical image. This microwave radiation comes directly from Titan itself, rather than being a reflection from the Sun as detected in visible-light images.”

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC.

The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The instrument team is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

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See:-
organic lakes – Probe data reveal Titan’s etched face, Nature, October 29, 2004
chemical antifreeze – Mysterious Titan data fascinate scientists, San Franscico Chronicle, October 29, 2004
cracked eggshell – Titan’s surface like an icy eggshell, images show, USA Today, October 29, 2004
passive radiometer – Titan’s Whispers, NASA, October 28, 2004

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