Flat spots on Saturn’s moon Titan may be the floors of ancient lake beds0
- From Around the Web, Space
- June 16, 2020
New theory about the gas giant’s largest satellite may solve a 20-year-old mystery
New theory about the gas giant’s largest satellite may solve a 20-year-old mystery
Small methane-filled lakes on the surface of Titan were likely formed by explosive, pressurized nitrogen just under the hazy moon’s surface, according to a new analysis of radar data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
“Titan’s extreme physical environment requires scientists to think differently about what we’ve learned of Earth’s granular dynamics,” said Josef Dufek, with the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Landforms are influenced by forces that aren’t intuitive to us because those forces aren’t so important on Earth. Titan is a strange, electrostatically sticky world.” Visually, Titan is the