Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere, and
the only world besides Earth known to have lakes and seas on its
surface. However, Titan has a frigid surface temperature of around minus
290 degrees Fahrenheit (94 kelvins). The rain that falls from Titan's
skies is not water, but contains liquid methane and ethane, compounds
that are gases at Earth's temperatures. While most of Saturn's moons
display their ancient faces pockmarked by thousands of craters, Titan –
Saturn's largest moon – may look much younger than it really is because
its craters are getting erased. Dunes of exotic, hydrocarbon sand are
slowly but steadily filling in its craters, according to new research
using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
"Most of the Saturnian satellites – Titan's siblings – have thousands
and thousands of craters on their surface. So far on Titan, of the 50
percent of the surface that we've seen in high resolution, we've only
found about 60 craters," said Catherine Neish, a Cassini radar team
associate based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
"It's possible that there are many more craters on Titan, but they are
not visible from space because they are so eroded. We typically estimate
the age of a planet's surface by counting the number of craters on it
(more craters means an older surface). But if processes like stream
erosion or drifting sand dunes are filling them in, it's possible that
the surface is much older that it appears.
"This research is the first quantitative estimate of how much the
weather on Titan has modified its surface," adds Neish.*Neish and her
team compared craters on Titan to craters on Jupiter's moon Ganymede.
Ganymede is a giant moon with a water ice crust, similar to Titan, so
craters on the two moons should have similar shapes. However, Ganymede
has almost no atmosphere and thus no wind or rain to erode its surface.
"We found that craters on Titan were on average hundreds of yards
[meters] shallower than similarly sized craters on Ganymede, suggesting
that some process on Titan is filling its craters," says Neish, who is
lead author of a paper about this research published online in the
journal Icarus on Dec. 3, 2012.
The team used the average depth-versus-diameter trend for craters on
Ganymede derived from stereo images from NASA's Galileo spacecraft. The
same trend for craters on Titan was calculated using estimates of the
crater depth from images made by Cassini's radar instrument.
Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen with a trace of methane and
other, more complex molecules made of hydrogen and carbon
(hydrocarbons). The source of Titan's methane remains a mystery because
methane in the atmosphere is broken down over relatively short time
scales by sunlight. Fragments of methane molecules then recombine into
more complex hydrocarbons in the upper atmosphere, forming a thick,
orange smog that hides the surface from view. Some of the larger
particles eventually rain out onto the surface, where they appear to get
bound together to form the sand.
"Since the sand appears to be produced from the atmospheric methane,
Titan must have had methane in its atmosphere for at least several
hundred million years in order to fill craters to the levels we are
seeing," says Neish. However, researchers estimate Titan's current
supply of methane should be broken down by sunlight within tens of
millions of years, so Titan either had a lot more methane in the past,
or it is being replenished somehow.
Team members say it's possible that other processes could be filling
the craters on Titan: erosion from the flow of liquid methane and
ethane, for example. However, this type of weathering tends to fill a
crater quickly at first, then more slowly as the crater rim gets worn
down and less steep. If liquid erosion were primarily responsible for
the infill, then the team would expect to see a lot of partially filled
craters on Titan. "However, this is not the case," says Neish. "Instead
we see craters at all stages; some just beginning to be filled in, some
halfway, and some that are almost completely full. This suggests a
process like windblown sand, which fills craters and other features at a
steady rate."
Solid materials under stress flow very slowly over time. This is
called viscous flow, and it is like what happens when someone takes a
scoop out of a fresh tub of whipped cream -- the material slowly flows
in to fill the hole and flatten the surface. Craters on icy satellites
tend to get shallower over time as the ice flows viscously, so it's
possible that some of the shallow craters on Titan are simply much older
or experienced a higher heat flow than the similarly sized, fresh
craters on Ganymede studied in this work.
However, Titan's crust is mostly water ice, and at the extremely low
temperatures on Titan, ice shouldn't flow enough to account for such a
large difference in depth compared to the Ganymede craters, according to
the team. Also, just like stream erosion, deformation from viscous flow
tends to happen rapidly at first, then more slowly as the material
adjusts, so one would expect to see a lot of partially filled craters on
Titan if its surface were deforming easily through viscous flow.
As Cassini flies past Titan on its multi-year tour of Saturn and its
moons, its radar instrument gradually builds up a map of the surface. To
date, the instrument has provided data in strips covering approximately
50 percent of Titan's surface. The craters measured by the team are all
within about 30 degrees of the equator, a relatively dry region on
Titan.
"However, the presence of liquids on the surface and in the near
subsurface can also cause extensive modification to crater shape, as is
observed on Earth," says Neish. "In the case of Titan, liquids consist
of hydrocarbons, either as wet sediments (such as those observed at the
Huygens landing site) or shallow marine environments (such as the lakes
observed at the north and south poles). Craters formed in similar
environments on Earth lack any significant surface topography, including
the absence of a raised rim, as wet sediments slump into the crater.
It is possible that the lack of topography associated with
marine-target impacts may help to explain the relative scarcity of
impact craters observed near the poles of Titan. If Titan's polar
regions are saturated by liquid hydrocarbons, craters formed in those
regions may lack any recognizable topographic expression."
The team thinks these considerations are good areas for more
research. Based on the data so far, the difference in depth between
craters on Titan and Ganymede is best explained by filling from
windblown sand.
However, erosion from liquids and viscous flow might
contribute to the modification of Titan's craters.
NASA's Cassini mission, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the
NASA Postdoctoral Program, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities, funded the research.
The Cassini-Huygens mission
is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and ASI,
the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian
Space Agency, working with team members from the US and several
European countries.
Fuente: The Daily Galaxy via JPL/Cassini Mission
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