Liquid methane and ethane flow through a subterranean plumbing system on Titan, which drains lakes and connects seas.
That’s one of the first scientific results from the latest, most complete map of the Saturnian moon’s topography.Planetary scientist Paul Corlies of Cornell University and colleagues released the map — based on all the data from NASA’s Cassini mission, which ended in September (SN Online: 9/15/17) — in Geophysical Research Letters on December 2.
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, hosts seas, lakes, clouds and rain — all composed of hydrocarbons such as methane and ethane instead of water. The elevations of seas and mountains across 9 percent of Titan’s surface were directly recorded by Cassini as it flew past Titan over 13 years. The researchers had to infer altitudes for the rest of the globe.
Compared with previous maps, the new one adds mountains in the southern hemisphere and shows that Titan is more of a squashed sphere than previously thought. Researchers can now use the map to build computer simulations of everything from Titan’s atmosphere to its interior structure. “Within hours of the paper actually being available online, people we’ve never collaborated with started contacting [Corlies] to ask how to get the data,” says study coauthor Alexander Hayes, a planetary scientist also at Cornell.
But the first study to use the map, also published December 2 in Geophysical Research Letters, is research that Hayes has been working on for a decade. The work shows that Titan has a sea level as well as the hydrocarbon equivalent of groundwater — pores in subsurface rock are filled with liquid that can seep into and between the lakes and seas.
“Looking for actual evidence that the lakes could be communicating was a fundamental question from Cassini,” Hayes says….
The post Most complete map of Titan reveals connected seas and cookie-cutter lakes appeared first on FeedBox.