“Gassy” Is Cassini’s Take On Saturn’s Titan

January 16, 2008

The European Space Agency (ESA) is reporting the Cassini radar team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the U.S. has released a study that indicates Saturn‘s orange moon, Titan, has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all of the known oil and natural reserves on Earth. This assessment is based upon data from the Cassini satellite, which will again make another radar flyby of Titan on February 22nd… in fact, Cassini at that time will witness the ESA’s landing of their Huygens probe on Titan. According to Ralph Lorenz, the study leader, Titan is covered in carbon-bearing material. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon’s surface. The planet’s dunes are probably compose of tholins, the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry, a term coined by Carl Sagan. Hydrocarbons rain down from the sky onto the planet and collect in lakes and dunes. As a scale for the amount of hydrocarbons on Titan, check this out… proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total about 130 thousand million tons. That’s enough to provide 300x the amount of energy the U.S. uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. Dozens of Titan’s lakes, individually, have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane.