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It's been more than a year since Cassini's extremely reliable NASA probe made its last act, plunging into the atmosphere of Saturn where it was shattered by intense friction. It was a bittersweet day for the astronomy community, but the wealth of information gathered by Cassini during its 13-year orbit around Saturn still opens up new discoveries.
In a new article published in Nature Astronomy, researchers at the Cassini project revealed that the radar data provided by the spacecraft now showed that Titan, Saturn's moon, was even more special than scientists already thought. The lakes of the moon, which were observed by Cassini during his last visit in 2017, are much deeper than previously thought.
The Earth contains a lot of liquid on the surface, but the same can not be said of many other worlds in our solar system. Titan is the exception, with vast lakes visible from the space. The lakes are not filled with liquid water, however, Titan is far too cold for this to be possible. Instead, Titan's lakes are filled with methane, cooled to the point of becoming a liquid rather than a gas as we think on Earth.
Scientists know that these lakes have existed for some time, but Cassini has revealed their depth. In the new study, the research team revealed that the lakes are more than 300 feet deep and that they are replenished by mechanisms similar to those we see on Earth with water in the form of liquid, steam and rain.
"Whenever we make discoveries on Titan, Titan becomes more and more mysterious," said lead author Marco Mastrogiuseppe of Caltech in a statement. "But these new measures help answer a few key questions. We can actually better understand the hydrology of Titan. "
This discovery also reminds us that missions such as Cassini can generate new developments even years after their closure and that the efficiency with which NASA's spacecraft and mobile devices collect data quickly surpasses the ability of human scientists to analyze.
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