Data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have allowed scientists to estimate the depth of Kraken Mare, the largest methane sea to the moon of Saturn Tità.
New research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research is expanding our knowledge about the seas of Titan hydrocarbons, specifically Kraken Mother. This sea, about 1,000 miles long, is larger than the five major American lakes combined and contains about 80% of the moon’s surface liquids. The seas of Titan contain a lot of methane and ethane and are comparable to the liquefied natural gas of the Earth.
Titan is the only moon in the solar system known for hosting an atmosphere. The thick, nitrogen-rich blanket that covers the moon hides a complex hydraulic system on the surface, but instead of liquid water, Titan’s rivers, lakes, and seas consist of oily black methane. Titan also presents other curiosities, such as gigantic dust storms, ice volcanoes, and huge sand dunes.
As the new research shows, the deeper parts of Mother Kraken could be so much more 1,000 feet (300 meters) deep. Tthe team, led by Valerio Poggiali, associate researcher at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, I can’t really be sure of that figure, because the radar pings that were used to determine the depth of the sea never reached the bottom of the sea.
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft orrbitada Saturn from 2004 to 2017, i scientists have already done so he studied some of the smaller seas of Titan using on board Cassini altimeter. OAugust 21, 2014, Cassini flew less than 970 km from Titan’s surface and was able to send radar pings Kraken Mare. Interestingly, this was the same overflight that led to the discovery of Ligeia Mare —a Fading “magical” island to Titus.
Researchers at Cornell and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory devised an orderly technique for determining the depth of Titan’s seas, which is to measure the differences between how long it takes for radar to bounce off the surface of the sea instead of the bottom of the sea. This technique helps to estimate the depth of the sea, but researchers must make certain assumptions about the density of fluids on Titan and the speed with which radio waves pass.
Using this technique, the team measured the depth of Moray Sinus, a northern estuary of Kraken Mare, which it found to be 280 feet. (85 meters) deep. The rate of absorption of radar waves suggests that the liquid in this part of the sea is made up of 70% methane, 16% nitrogen and 14% ethane. Scientists expected more methane than this because of the size and location of the sea, but this finding suggests a more uniform distribution of chemicals across the Moon’s various water bodies.
The altimetric explorations performed on the main part of Kraken Mare were less conclusive. As the authors write in the study, the NASA probe found “no evidence of signal returns from the seabed, suggesting that the liquid is too deep or too absorbent for Cassini’s radio waves to penetrate “. That said, if the liquid in this part of the sea has a composition similar to the liquid found in Moray Sinus, it must be deeper than 100 meters. and possibly up to 300 meters deep, according to the study.
Poggiali is confident that some robot submarine may one day be sent to Titan to explore Mother Kraken or some other body of water. And, in fact, he considers the new research to be a step in that direction.
“Thanks to our measurements, scientists can now infer the density of the liquid more accurately and therefore better calibrate the sonar on board the [future robotic submarine] and to understand the directional flows of the sea ”, explained Poggiali at Cornell University statement.
A conceptual plan of 2015 showed what such a mission might look like, but nothing has been approved in this regard. That said, NASA will send an air drone, called Dragonfly, to Titan, which should reach the moon sometime in the mid-2030s.