Radar study puts spotlight on Saturn moon Titan's hydrocarbon seas

NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its icy moons, including the majestic Titan, ended its mission with a death plunge into the giant ringed planet in 2017. Cassini's radar observations are providing intriguing new details about the seas of liquid hydrocarbons on the surface of Titan, our solar system's second-largest moon and a place of interest in the search for life beyond Earth. "Titan is really an Earth-like world with a diverse set of very familiar surface morphologies shaped by a methane-based hydrologic system operating in a dense nitrogen atmosphere," said Cornell University engineer and a planetary scientist Valerio Poggiali, lead author of the study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. The Cassini data indicated the rivers carry pure liquid methane that then mixes into the more ethane-rich liquids of the seas, much as freshwater in Earth's rivers mixes into saltwater oceans. Because the tidal period - Titan's day - is long, 16 Earth days, the tidal cycle is slow, so the tidal currents are generally weak," said planetary scientist and study co-author Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.