* Astronomy

New Computer Model Explains Lakes and Storms on Titan

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is an intriguing, alien world that's covered in a thick atmosphere with abundant methane. With an average surface temperature of a brisk -300 degrees Fahrenheit (about 90 kelvins) and a diameter just less than half of Earth's, Titan boasts methane clouds and fog, as well as rainstorms and plentiful lakes of liquid methane. It's the only place in the solar system, other than Earth, that has large bodies of liquid on its surface.
The origins of many of these features, however, remain puzzling to scientists. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a computer model of Titan's atmosphere and methane cycle that, for the first time, explains many of these phenomena in a relatively simple and coherent way.
In particular, the new model explains three baffling observations of Titan. One oddity was discovered in 2009, when researchers led by Caltech professor of planetary science Oded Aharonson found that Titan's methane lakes tend to cluster around its poles - and noted that there are more lakes in the northern hemisphere than in the south.
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Cassini: VIMS Global Map of Titan (2011)

An international team led by the University of Nantes has pieced together images gathered over six years by the Cassini mission to create a global mosaic of the surface of Titan. The global maps and animations of Saturn's largest moon are being presented by Stéphane Le Mouélic at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2011 in Nantes, France on Tuesday 4th October.

Title: Removal of Titan's Atmospheric Noble Gases by their Sequestration in Surface Clathrates
Authors: Olivier Mousis, Jonathan I. Lunine, Sylvain Picaud, Daniel Cordier, J. Hunter Waite, Jr., Kathleen E. Mandt

A striking feature of the atmosphere of Titan is that no heavy noble gases other than argon were detected by the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GCMS) aboard the Huygens probe during its descent to Titan's surface in January 2005. Here we provide an explanation of the mysterious absence or rarity of these noble gases in Titan's atmosphere: the thermodynamic conditions prevailing at the surface-atmosphere interface of the satellite allow the formation of multiple guest clathrates that preferentially store some species, including all heavy noble gases, over others. The clean water ice needed for formation of these clathrates could be delivered by successive episodes of cryovolcanic lavas that have been hypothesized to regularly cover the surface of Titan. The formation of clathrates in the porous lavas and their propensity for trapping Ar, Kr and Xe would progressively remove these species from the atmosphere of Titan over its history. In some circumstances, a global clathrate crust with an average thickness not exceeding a few meters could be sufficient on Titan for a complete removal of the heavy noble gases from the atmosphere.

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Putting it all Together on Titan

Three of Titan's major surface features -- dunes, craters and the enigmatic Xanadu -- appear in this radar image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The hazy, bright area at the left that extends to the lower center of the image marks the northwest edge of Xanadu, a continent-sized feature centred near the moon's equator. At upper right is the crater Ksa, first seen by Cassini in 2006. The dark lines running between these two features are linear dunes, similar to sand dunes on Earth in Egypt and Namibia.
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