NASA at 50 Finds Liquid Ethane on Titan

The National Aviation and Space Administration turned 50 this week. It isn’t the agency it used to be, the one that gave the world the Mercury 7 crowd, the Moonwalkers, even the first shuttle crews. Space is a mature field now, and the agency’s activities are divided between putting astronauts on a space station for reasons unknown and sending robots out to do science. The robots win again having just found liquid ethane on the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.

Actually, the US doesn’t get all the credit here. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Cassini space probe made 40 flybys of Titan that showed no global oceans of anything, but it did find a lake, dubbed Ontario Lacus, in Titan's south polar region in December 2007. Earth-bound scientists have determined that dark features in that region were liquid and not a dark solid. The lake is roughly 20,000 square kilometers (7,800 square miles) in area, slightly larger than North America's Lake Ontario. Bob Brown of the University of Arizona, Tucson, the team leader of Cassini's visual and mapping instrument, and he said, “This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid.”

NASA’s press release says, “Ethane and several other simple hydrocarbons have been identified in Titan's atmosphere, which consists of 95% nitrogen, with methane making up the other fiver percent. Ethane and other hydrocarbons are products from atmospheric chemistry caused by the breakdown of methane by sunlight. Some of the hydrocarbons react further and form fine aerosol particles. All of these things in Titan's atmosphere make detecting and identifying materials on the surface difficult, because these particles form a ubiquitous hydrocarbon haze that hinders the view. Liquid ethane was identified using a technique that removed the interference from the atmospheric hydrocarbons."

"Detection of liquid ethane confirms a long-held idea that lakes and seas filled with methane and ethane exist on Titan," said Larry Soderblom, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist with the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. "The fact we could detect the ethane spectral signatures of the lake even when it was so dimly illuminated, and at a slanted viewing path through Titan’s atmosphere, raises expectations for exciting future lake discoveries by our instrument.”

Happy 50th Birthday, NASA, but stop sending humans up to do a robot’s job.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Kensington Review Home