The Caves of Titan?
After landing the Huygens probe on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in 2005, the Cassini orbiter has been hanging around the neighbourhood taking some stunning images of a strangely familar world. The latest images come via the orbiter’s radar instrument and there’s a JPLnews video to accompany the press release.
From the JPL News press release.
Karst terrain on Earth occurs when water dissolves layers of bedrock, leaving dramatic rock outcroppings and sinkholes. Comparing images of White Canyon in Utah, the Darai Hills of Papua New Guinea, and Guangxi Province in China to an area of connected valleys and ridges on Titan known as Sikun Labyrinthus yields eerie similarities. The materials may be different – liquid methane and ethane on Titan instead of water, and probably some slurry of organic molecules on Titan instead of rock – but the processes are likely quite similar.
“Even though Titan is an alien world with much lower temperatures, we keep learning how many similarities there are to Earth,” said Karl Mitchell, a Cassini radar team associate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The karst-like landscape suggests there is a lot happening right now under the surface that we can’t see.”
Indeed, Mitchell said, if the karst landscape on Titan is consistent with Earth’s, there could very well be caves under the Titan surface.
Work on these analogies was spearheaded by Mike Malaska of Chapel Hill, N.C., an organic chemist by trade and a contributor in his spare time to unmannedspaceflight.com, a Web site for amateur space enthusiasts to try their hand at visualizing NASA data. Malaska approached radar team member Jani Radebaugh at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, about collaborative work after meeting her at last year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
I’m thinking..Pete was nodding at Assimov there and am now about to dig ‘Caves of Steel’ out of a box in the attic.
Wasn’t your intention but at least it gives me an excuse to put aside Egan’s ‘Incandesence’, which has been irritating me for weeks.
There may have been a inclination of the head in the general direction of Isaac…
Pete,
I reckon you are a big fan of Egan. I’m too thick to get through him.
Haven’t read him, Mark.
Probably the last sci-fi I was enthused about was Iain M Banks’ Culture novels.
Incandescence is not for the faint-hearted and barely functions as a piece of fiction. Much more enjoyable are the glorious earlier works like Diaspora and Permutation City. The short stories are also excellent.
Pete,
I think Egan is made for you. Give him a go, he does very hard science with longterm futuring.
@devileire I gave up on it when I started to write Shoul, Janub, Garm and Sard on a ball and rotating it!
Mark,
This may help, if you haven’t already discovered it:
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/NullChamber/NullChamber.html
Thanks a lot for letting us see this clip, Pete.