[extropy-chat] Huygens: First visitor to Titan

[Hal Finney]

I was on the road this morning when I saw the new pictures, but
now I've gotten home and I see that the Los Angeles Times has a
similar interpretation to what I thought I saw (link may require
subscription):
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-titan15jan15,0,3987702.story?coll=la-home-world

> Torrence Johnson, a member of the mission's camera team, said from the
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that planetary surfaces "look
> pretty much the same everywhere." That doesn't mean strange things
> are not going on outside the camera's eye. He said the lack of craters
> indicated the surface is young. Drainage channels show that something,
> perhaps hydrocarbon rivers, flowed across the surface at some point.
>
> It was unclear exactly where the probe landed. Pictures taken during
> a Cassini fly-by several months ago showed bright and dark areas, but
> scientists could not estimate the elevations of those areas. Johnson
> said the new pictures seemed to prove that the bright, icy areas are
> at a higher elevation than the darkened surface, where he thought the
> probe had landed.
>
> Some scientists had speculated that the dark areas were hydrocarbon seas,
> but the evidence from the probe seemed to show it to be a hard surface.
>
> "This proves pretty conclusively there are not liquid oceans," said Bob
> Mitchell, Cassini program manager at JPL. "That's not to say there's
> not lakes or ponds."

However the New York Times is still clinging to the wet-ocean theory
http://nytimes.com/2005/01/16/science/16saturn.html :

> If this evidence of possible liquids on Titan's landscape is confirmed
> it would support widely held pre-mission conjecture that the planet-sized
> moon has lakes and perhaps seas of liquid methane or ethane. It could thus
> prove to be the mission's most consequential discovery: that not only is
> Titan the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere,
> but it also appears to have flowing surface liquids, putting it in the
> company of only Earth and possibly Jupiter's moon Io, with its lava flows.

Slashdot also points to some amateur analysis, mosaics, animations and
stereo images at http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens .

Hal