Thursday, March 27, 2014

Titan's Ligeia Mare is Waveless and Glassy Smooth

New radar measurements of an enormous sea on Titan offer insights into the weather patterns and landscape composition of the Saturnian moon. The measurements, made in 2013 by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, reveal that the surface of Ligeia Mare, Titan’s second largest sea, possesses a mirror-like smoothness, possibly due to a lack of winds.

“If you could look out on this sea, it would be really still. It would just be a totally glassy surface,” said Howard Zebker, professor of geophysics and of electrical engineering at Stanford who is the lead author of a new study detailing the research.

The findings, recently published online in Geophysical Research Letters, also indicate that the solid terrain surrounding the sea is likely made of solid organic materials and not frozen water.

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