NASA's Cassini mission revealed new features of the hydrocarbon seas of Saturn's moon Titan.
During a flyby in August the Cassini spacecraft noticed a bright feature in the seas that could be related to mysterious land called "magic islands," NASA reported.
The researchers looked at the fascinating features, located in the sea Kraken Mare, in two different wavelengths. The data suggests the features share similarities to other regions of Titan that the researchers have interpreted as waves or wet ground. The observations also suggest the "islands" could actually be floating debris.
The flyby also included a segment designed to collect altimetry (or height) data using the spacecraft's radar instrument shore-to-shore across Kraken Mare. For a 25-mile segment of the collected data the radar beam bounced back off the sea-bottom and back to the spacecraft, demonstrating the sea's depth. The region, which is near the mouth of a large river valley was found to be between 66 and 115 feet deep.
The researchers believe the sea is much deeper in the areas where the signal did not bounce back, but there is a chance the signal also could have been absorbed by the methane and ethane liquid. Data on the area around Kraken Mare shows steep slopes leading down into the sea, also suggesting the feature is relatively deep.
"The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The VIMS team is based at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the US and several European countries," NASA stated.
