Lakes On Titan
by Nasa
Title
Lakes On Titan
Artist
Nasa
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
This image of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, obtained by Cassini's radar instrument during a near-polar flyby on Feb. 22, 2007 is part of a large panoramic swath. This particular section features the moon's lakes, one of which is larger than any lake on Earth and could be legitimately called a sea. Some of these lakes are partly filled with dark material thought to be liquid hydrocarbons. ..This final section of the swath, which is closest to the pole, contains by far the largest lakes observed by Cassini's radar to date. Part of the first of these was seen during a previous flyby and is fed by a long river -- over 200 kilometers (120 miles) in length, and hundreds of meters to over 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in width - running through what appears to be a flood plain. The lake's bright, jutting shoreline indicates that old, eroded landforms may have been flooded. The end of the next lake was also observed before appearing to be, in both form and scale, similar to Lake Powell, a flooded drainage system in Utah and Arizona. We can now see that this lake on Titan connects via a relatively narrow channel to a much larger (at least 45,000 square kilometers or 17,000 square miles) lake, containing a large (approximately 12,000 square kilometers or 4,600 square miles) island or peninsula (see PIA09180). The last part of the image passes close to the pole (86 degrees north, 290 degrees east), before heading east and slightly south. At the end of the swath, we see the largest lake observed yet -- at least 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles), which is greater in extent than one of the largest lakes on Earth, Lake Superior (82,000 square kilometers or 32,000 square miles), and covers a greater fraction of Titan than the largest terrestrial inland sea, the Black Sea. The Black Sea covers 0.085 percent of the surface of the Earth; this newly observed body on Titan covers at least 0.12 percent of the surface of Titan. Because of its size, scientists are calling this a s
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March 14th, 2013
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