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attractions phone # :654-332-9087 email :Titan@gmail.com Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system Titan is the largest moon of Saturn Titan has a whole sub ocean attractions Titan's atmosphere is made of nitrogen, hydrogen, methane, trace and other gases Facts

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June 28, 2012: Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn's moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell. The finding appears in today's edition of the journal Science.

"Cassini's detection of large tides on Titan leads to the almost inescapable conclusion that there is a hidden ocean at depth," said Luciano Iess, the paper's lead author and a Cassini team member at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. "The search for water is an important goal in solar system exploration, and now we've spotted another place where it is abundant."

The evidence is tidal. Saturn's powerful gravity stretches and deforms Titan as the moon moves around the gas giant planet. If Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn should cause bulges, or solid "tides," on the moon only 3 feet (1 meter) in height. Instead, the data show Saturn creates solid tides approximately 30 feet (10 meters) in height. This suggests Titan is not made entirely of solid rocky material.

At first, scientists were not sure Cassini would be able to detect the bulges caused by Saturn's pull on Titan. Cassini succeeded, however, by measuring Titan's gravitational field during six close flybys from Feb. 27, 2006, to Feb. 18, 2011. These gravity measurements, collected with the aid of NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), revealed the size of Titan's tides.

"We were making ultrasensitive measurements, and thankfully Cassini and the DSN were able to maintain a very stable link," said Sami Asmar, a Cassini team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The tides on Titan pulled up by Saturn aren't huge compared to the pull the biggest planet, Jupiter, exerts on some of its moons. But, short of being able to drill on Titan's surface, the gravity measurements provide the best data we have of Titan's internal structure."

An ocean layer does not have to be huge or deep to create the observed tides. A liquid layer between the external, deformable shell and a solid mantle would enable Titan to bulge and compress as it orbits Saturn. Because Titan's surface is mostly made of water ice, which is abundant in moons of the outer solar system, scientists believe Titan's ocean is likely mostly liquid water.

On Earth, tides result from the gravitational attraction of the moon and sun pulling on our surface oceans. In the open oceans, those can be as high as two feet (60 centimeters). The gravitational pulling by the sun and moon also causes Earth's crust to bulge in solid tides of about 20 inches (50 centimeters).

The presence of a subsurface layer of liquid water at Titan is not by itself an indicator for life. Scientists think life is more likely to arise when liquid water is in contact with rock, and these measurements cannot tell whether the ocean bottom is made up of rock or ice.

The results have a bigger implication for the mystery of methane replenishment on Titan. Methane is abundant in Titan's atmosphere, yet researchers believe the methane is unstable, so there must be a supply to maintain its abundance.

"The presence of a liquid water layer in Titan is important because we want to understand how methane is stored in Titan's interior and how it may outgas to the surface," said Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini team member at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "This is important because everything that is unique about Titan derives from the presence of abundant methane, yet the methane in the atmosphere should be destroyed on geologically short timescales."

A liquid water ocean, "salted" with ammonia, could produce buoyant ammonia-water liquids that bubble up through the crust and liberate methane from the ice. Such an ocean could serve also as a deep reservoir for storing methane.

For more information about Cassini's mission to Saturn, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

Production editor:
Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. DSN, also managed by JPL, is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the solar system and the universe. The network also supports selected Earth-orbiting missions. Cassini's radio science team is based at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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June 28, 2012: Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn's moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell. The finding appears in today's edition of the journal Science.

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Introduction

Saturn's largest moon Titan is an extraordinary and exceptional world. Among our solar system's more than 150 known moons, Titan is the only one with a substantial atmosphere. And of all the places in the solar system, Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids in the form of rivers, lakes and seas on its surface.

Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and is the second largest moon in our solar system. Jupiter's moon Ganymede is just a little bit larger (by about 2 percent). Titan's atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, like Earth's, but with a surface pressure 50 percent higher than Earth's. Titan has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. The largest seas are hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles wide. Beneath Titan's thick crust of water ice is more liquid-an ocean primarily of water rather than methane. Titan's subsurface water could be a place to harbor life as we know it, while its surface lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons could conceivably harbor life that uses different chemistry than we're used to-that is, life as we don't yet know it. Titan could also be a lifeless world.

10 Things to Know About Titan
Did You Know?
Did You Know?

As exotic as Titan might sound, in some ways it's one of the most hospitable worlds in the solar system. Titan's nitrogen atmosphere is so dense that a human wouldn't need a pressure suit to walk around on the surface. He or she would, however, need an oxygen mask and protection against the cold-temperatures at Titan's surface are around minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179 Celsius).

Titan's dense atmosphere, as well as gravity roughly equivalent to Earth's Moon, mean that a raindrop falling through Titan's sky would fall more slowly than on Earth. While Earth rain falls at about 20 miles per hour (9.2 meters per second), scientists have calculated that rain on Titan falls at about 3.5 miles per hour (1.6 meters per second), or about six times more slowly than Earth's rain. Titan's raindrops can also be pretty large. The maximum diameter of Earth raindrops is about 0.25 inches (6.5 millimeters) while raindrops on Titan can reach diameters of 0.37 inches (9.5 millimeters), or about 50 percent larger than an Earth raindrop.
Pop Culture
Pop Culture

Titan was famously featured in the 2009 film "Star Trek"-the U.S.S. Enterprise comes out of warp in Titan's atmosphere in order to sneak up on the Romulan ship attacking Earth. Titan also appeared in the film "Star Trek Nemesis," as well as an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Several other television shows and films feature Titan, such as the film "Gattaca," and the shows "Futurama" and "Eureka," as well as the iconic anime series "Cowboy Bebop." Dozens of video games also feature Titan, as do several comics from Marvel and DC, among others.

Titan has been a setting or subject in dozens of short stories and novels by giants of science fiction including Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Isaac Asimov, as well as legendary "Star Trek" actress Nichelle Nichols. Even literary greats such as Kurt Vonnegut have included Titan in their fiction.

Solar System in My Neighborhood

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With a few materials and a few steps, you can build your own glasses to view 3D images.

Cassini explores Saturn and its intriguing rings and moons.

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Resources
Resources
NASA-JPL's Titan Science Page for the Cassini mission NASA Planetary Photojournal - Titan NASA-JPL's Cassini Mission Page About Saturn's Other Moons

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Introduction Saturn's largest moon Titan is an extraordinary and exceptional world. Among our solar system's more than 150 known moons, Titan is the only one with a substantial atmosphere. And of all the places in the solar system, Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids in the form of rivers, lakes and seas on its surface.

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Saturn's Moon Titan: Another Earth? - Documentary HD