Showing posts with label titan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label titan. Show all posts

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Lakes on Titan confirmed

This is great news--Cassini scientists have verified that one of the dark pools on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan is liquid, not solid. We'd seen these features and at first thought they were lakes and seas but then found we couldn't tell from photographs alone whether they were still liquid or had frozen or dried up. The new results use spectroscopy and have picked up the signature of ethane. Larry Soderblom, a USGS scientist, said, "The fact we could detect the ethane spectral signatures of the lake even when it was so dimly illuminated, and at a slanted viewing path through Titan's atmosphere, raises expectations for exciting future lake discoveries by our instrument."

They've named this lake Ontario Lacus, Latin for Lake Ontario, and in fact the lake is a little bigger than Lake Ontario here on earth.