Surf's Up---On Saturn's Moon Titan, Cassini Mission Reveals

Artist's conception of Titan's lake/ JPL 

When Gustav Holtz created The Planets, an astrologically-based musical tour of the planets, he called Saturn the "Bringer of Old Age."  Now NASA's Cassini spacecraft has beamed home startling proof that Saturn's moon Titan has a liquid lake on its surface--making it a potential nursery instead of a geriatric wing.

That makes Titan the only body in the solar system, other than our own Earth, now proven to have liquid on its surface. The liquid mix includes liquid hydrocarbons and ethane.  

How'd they figure that out? After all, there's no way to dip a finger in and taste-except with advanced scientific tools. Cassini's finely-tuned instruments were able to use infrared light to chemically identify different materials.

Cassini and its Huygens probe located the large Titian lake in December 2007. The lake is just a little bit bigger than Lake Ontario, so the Cassini team named it, logically enough, Ontario Lacus (and you thought scientists didn't have a sense of humor!).

It's a team act up there, working the Saturn/Titan commute.. Cassini, launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in October 1997, carried the Huygens probe aloft. The mission reached Saturn and its moon, which are about 793 million miles away, in July 2004.

On December 24, 2004, Cassini sent the Huygens probe down to Titan's surface. The probe arrived safely on Jan. 15,2005 and performed its mission. Since then the team of instruments on the  Cassini spacecraft has been shipping exploration information back home via three microwave antennas.

Cassini is truly an international mission of discovery. NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency form the major members of the cooperative project. The mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), while  the University of Arizona provides the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team.