Official News - page 10

REAL LIFE NEWS: MOUNTAINS AND LAKES ON TITAN

by Hazed

Last month, the Cassini spacecraft took a picture of a mile-high mountain range on Titan. The mountains run for about 93 miles and are about 19 miles wide - and they are possibly capped with methane "snow" (hence the justification for adding skiing to Titan in Fed2).

Take a look at the full information released by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and look at a picture, on the JPL web site at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=709.

Now Cassini has made another discovery: scientists say it has spotted unmistakable evidence of lakes of liquid methane on the moon. Radar images reveal dark, smooth patches that range in size from 2 to 44 miles across. They look like the lakes found in craters or calderas on Earth, and they have channels feeding into them just like rivers feed into lakes on Earth.

The temperature on Titan rarely goes above -179C (-290F) so scientists have long hypothesized that large quantities of methane should pool on the surface of the moon into lakes or even large seas, but until now there has been little evidence this has happened.

Maybe now I need to add scuba diving in the methane lakes...

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