Mystery of the Missing Waves on Titan

[n2doc]

July 22, 2013: One of the most shocking discoveries of the past 10 years is how much the landscape of Saturn's moon Titan resembles Earth. Like our own blue planet, the surface of Titan is dotted with lakes and seas; it has river channels, islands, mud, rain clouds and maybe even rainbows. The giant moon is undeniably wet.

The "water" on Titan is not, however, H2O. With a surface temperature dipping 290 degrees F below zero, Titan is far too cold for liquid water. Instead, researchers believe the fluid that sculpts Titan is an unknown mixture of methane, ethane, and other hard-to-freeze hydrocarbons.


The idea that Titan is a wet world with its own alien waters is widely accepted by planetary scientists. Nothing else can account for the observations: NASA's Cassini spacecraft has flown by Titan more than 90 times since 2004, pinging the Moon with radar and mapping its lakes and seas. ESA's Huygens probe parachuted to the surface of Titan in 2005, descending through humid clouds and actually landing in moist soil.

Yet something has been bothering Alex Hayes, a planetary scientist on the Cassini radar team at Cornell University.

If Titan is really so wet, he wonders, "Where are all the waves?"

more
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/22jul_titan/

[Cleita]

1. This is probably going to sound stupid, but wouldn't Titan need its own moon to create

tides and therefore waves?



I'm a non scientist here with very little background in physical science so forgive me if it seems stupid. I just remember grade school science teaching us about the tides and how the moon affects them.

[n2doc]

2. Tides could be from interactions with Saturn, or other moons, and the Sun

Waves are created by winds, or in the case of tidal bores, by tides interacting with solid features, or earthquakes (Titanquakes). But most waves are generated by wind.

[Cleita]

3. So I guess this takes us to what conditions create winds? eom

[n2doc]

4. The article discusses this

Winds are simply a way that energy gets re-distributed. On Earth, we have a lot of winds that move energy/heat from the Equator to the poles.

[itsrobert]

6. Maybe the pull from Saturn is real strong

and the pull on the ocean/lakes do not cause them to go up and down as they are always up. Just one unscientific scenario.

[DetlefK]

5. I think, the low temperature leads to higher viscosity.

Lower temperature means less phonons. In molecules that means less energy in rotational and vibrational movements. Less movement allows closer packing of atoms.

My guess is that the molecules are so densely packed that the van-der-Waals-attraction between them is stronger than usual (distance-law 1/R^6). And when molecules have a higher attraction to each other, the macroscopic phase gets stickier.

[Shankapotomus]

7. Farthest surface image

of a planetary body.

Titan.

[Lugal Zaggesi]

8. Titan's not a planet

Neither is Pluto, anymore:
http://www.universetoday.com/13573/why-pluto-is-no-longer-a-planet/

But on the bright side, there will be dozens of trans-Neptunian "dwarf planets" like Pluto and Eris found, probably.
Which gives plenty of destinations to be explored in the Kuiper Belt:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

We could have a record for "image of most distant rocky surface" in the Solar System, with the Titan photo being the current record holder.

[Shankapotomus]

9. Why did I write "planetary"??!!

Why???!!! I knew it was a moon!! I've always known it was a moon!

Now I've been exposed as ignorant and I wasn't even ignorant! And in the Science group!

Oh,curses to you, Internet!

[Lugal Zaggesi]

10. LOL

Just blame alcohol - that's what I do Saturday nights.

Plus, I wanted to segue to that Pluto mission.
Notice that when it was launched, Pluto was still "the last planet to be explored".
Then the astronomers went and changed the definition of "planet" during the journey.
D'oh !

Now the probe will find just a big lump of icy rock, not "the last planet".
Should be arriving July 2015...

[Shankapotomus]

11. That must have been disappointing

to the specialists on the Pluto mission.

Still, planet or no planet, Pluto looks large enough to have an interesting surface.

[Lugal Zaggesi]

12. Well, it's still the most famous Kuiper Belt object

But I bet their kids are disappointed...

("HA ha! Your Mom's mission isn't even to a PLANET !&quot
Kids can be cruel.

Kuiper Belt, Oort cloud - it's a big Solar System.
They should get started on Franklin Chang Díaz's plasma rocket (VASIMR) - present rockets are much too slow:

http://www.adastrarocket.com/aarc/Franklin
He's a NASA astronaut from Costa Rica - quite smart, and he has a good idea.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1006/01vasimr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket
http://www.adastrarocket.com/aarc/