Liquid Lakes On Saturn's Moon Confirmed 188
Riding with Robots writes "Scientists have been using the robotic spacecraft Cassini to explore what looked to be large lakes of hydrocarbons on the surface of Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan. But they couldn't be entirely sure that the features were actually liquid lakes, and not simply very smooth, solid material. Now, new findings seem to confirm that the observations really do show extensive seas of liquid ethane and other hydrocarbons. In fact, Titan seems to have an entire 'water' cycle of ethane evaporation, rain and rivers."
Re:what about venus ? (Score:3, Informative)
No, Venus's surface is a desert. It'd be hard to get a river of metal anyway: only a few metals are liquid on its surface and not even the extremely abundant ones like iron.
Re:Tidal Lock (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tidal Lock (Score:5, Informative)
All of the medium to large satellites (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Phoebe), except Hyperion, which has a chaotic spin, and I think Phoebe, which is irregular as heck anyway. All the captured, irregular moons cannot be counted on to spin locked to the planet. The inner small moons (Pan, Daphnis, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Janus, and Epimetheus) are tidally locked according to the data.
Re:Sorry to bust your dreams... (Score:2, Informative)
Seems counterintuitive to me. An object traveling from Titan to Earth would be falling into the Sun's gravity well. Some energy would be required to get the object out of the neighborhood of Saturn but the bulk of the acceleration to 29.7 km/s could occur naturally by falling, no?
No, but don't feel bad, it's a common misconception.
Turns out traveling towards the sun is hard. In fact, it's just as hard as traveling away from the sun. And you should be thankful for that, after all you wouldn't want the Earth to "fall" into the Sun.
Basically, all the objects in the solar system are in some type of orbit with respect to the sun. Getting closer or farther from the Sun (or from the Earth), means changing your orbit speed, and therefore your orbit. It takes the exact same energy to move to a higher orbit that it does to go from that higher orbit back to the lower orbit. If you're interested in that type of stuff, give orbiter [ucl.ac.uk] a try.