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posted by martyb on Thursday May 02 2019, @05:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the Ice-Ice-Titan-(too-cold) dept.

In a paper published Monday, scientists have spotted a massive expanse of water-ice stradling Saturn's enigmatic moon Titan.

That ice block stretches across nearly half of Titan's girth. The feature was a surprise companion to the patches of water ice scientists expected to find, and they aren't positive precisely what sort of geologic feature it might indicate. The research is based on data gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which spent 13 years studying the Saturn system and made more than 100 flybys of the massive moon before self-destructing in September 2017.

The information was gleaned using a new statistical technique called "Principal Component Analysis" that filtered out dominant features in data obtained by Cassini to uncover smaller signatures such as water ice.

[Caitlin Griffith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona] said she isn't sure yet what the massive line of ice, which she compares to a scar, represents—it will take more research to pin down what left the ice uncovered on the surface of Titan. "It's a big feature that tells us something about the way that Titan was in the past, but we don't know really what it is," she said. "I think right now it's basically telling us that it's complicated, the surface is fairly complicated."

Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University in Utah not associated with the research, speculated that the ice belt might be due to a massive geological faulting event (Titan-quake?) pushing a stretch of the icy bedrock upward leaving it exposed.

Caitlin A. Griffith, Paulo F. Penteado, Jake D. Turner, Catherine D. Neish, Giuseppe Mitri, Nicholas J. Montiel, Ashley Schoenfeld & Rosaly M. C. Lopes, A corridor of exposed ice-rich bedrock across Titan's tropical region, Nature Astronomy (2019), DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0756-5


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 03 2019, @06:10PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday May 03 2019, @06:10PM (#838493) Journal

    It experiences erosion and other conditions at a rate you aren't likely to see anywhere else. There may be some of that happening on Mars, but with Titan you have interactions between the liquid hydrocarbons and "land" (ice and rock).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA18430-SaturnMoon-Titan-EvolvingFeature-20140821.jpg [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA20021-SaturnMoonTitan-MagicIsland-20160302.jpg [wikipedia.org]

    It's true that there are scientists who will go gaga over every asteroid, objects like 2014 MU69, or any other barren rock, and study an object's properties in great detail. But Titan is clearly unique and arguably a better object to look at.

    Given the dynamic surface and atmosphere, there should be constant surveillance of Titan with orbiter(s). Just as we should be doing stuff like monitoring Jupiter constantly to see it get hit by asteroids, we should be monitoring the movement of clouds and liquids on Titan. There is a potential for humans to live there without pressure suits (just every other kind), so it should be considered a top colonization target alongside the likes of Mars, the Moon, etc. And finally you have the combination of high atmospheric pressure and low surface gravity which enables aircraft to perform better than anywhere else in the (known) solar system. So we can send all kinds of gliders and drones to get a very detailed look at the surface. Nuclear power will probably be needed to accomplish anything of note there, but it can be done.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday May 04 2019, @01:06AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday May 04 2019, @01:06AM (#838655) Journal

    Correction: Ultimately we should be stopping all asteroids from hitting Jupiter or other gas giants, so that we can turn them into money instead.

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