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Posted by baalke on October 11, 2007, 5:06 pm
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-117
Cassini Provides New Views of Titan's Land of Lakes and Seas
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
October 11, 2007
Newly assembled radar images from the Cassini spacecraft provide
the best view of the hydrocarbon lakes and seas on the north pole
of Saturn's moon Titan, while a new radar image reveals that Titan's
south polar region also has lakes.
The southern region images were beamed back after an Oct. 2 flyby in
which a prime goal was the hunt for lakes at the south pole.
A new mosaic image, created by stitching together radar images from
seven Titan flybys over the last year and a half, shows a north pole
pitted with giant lakes and seas, at least one of them larger than
Lake
Superior.
Approximately 60 percent of Titan's north polar region above 60
degrees
latitude has been mapped by Cassini's radar instrument. About 14
percent
of the mapped region is covered by what scientists interpret as liquid
hydrocarbon lakes.
"This is our version of mapping Alaska, the northern parts of Canada,
Greenland, Scandinavia and Northern Russia," said Rosaly Lopes,
Cassini
radar scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
"It's like mapping these regions of Earth for the first time."
Lakes and seas are very common at the high northern latitudes of
Titan,
which is in winter now. Scientists say it rains methane and ethane
there, filling the lakes and seas. These liquids also carve meandering
rivers and channels on the moon's surface. Now Cassini is moving into
unknown territory, the south pole of Titan. "We wanted to see if there
are more lakes present there and, sure enough, there they are, three
little lakes smiling back at us. Titan is indeed the land of lakes and
seas," said Lopes. "It will be interesting to see the differences
between the north and south polar regions."
It is now summer at Titan's south pole. A season on Titan lasts nearly
7.5 years, one quarter of a Saturn year, which is 29.5 years long.
Monitoring seasonal change helps scientists understand the processes
at
work there.
Scientists are making progress in understanding how the lakes may have
formed. On Earth, lakes fill low spots or are created when the local
topography intersects a groundwater table. Lopes and her colleagues
think that the depressions containing the lakes on Titan may have
formed
by volcanism or by a type of erosion (called karstic) of the surface,
leaving a depression where liquids can accumulate. Karstic lakes are
common on Earth. For example in parts of Minnesota and central Florida
there are hundreds of such lakes.
"The lakes we are observing on Titan appear to be in varying states of
fullness, suggesting their involvement in a complex hydrologic system
akin to Earth's water cycle. This makes Titan unique among the
extra-terrestrial bodies in our solar system," said Alex Hayes, a
graduate student who studies Cassini radar data at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
"The lakes we have seen so far vary in size from the smallest
observable, approximately 1 square kilometer (0.4 square miles), to
greater than 100,000 square kilometers (40,000 square miles), which is
slightly larger than the Great Lakes in the Midwestern U.S.," Hayes
said. "Of the roughly 400 observed lakes, 70 percent of their area is
taken up by large "seas" greater than 26,000 square kilometers (10,000
square miles)."
Future radar flybys will image closer to the southern pole and are
expected to show more lakes.
For images and more information visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
<javascript:openNASAWindow('http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov')> .
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the
Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled
at
JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space
Agency,
working with team members from the United States and several European
countries.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Media contact: Carolina Martinez 818-354-9382
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
carolina.martinez@jpl.nasa.gov
2007-117
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