Cape Town - Nasa’s Cassini mission has revealed evidence of an ocean inside Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which might be as salty as Earth’s Dead Sea.
Cassini spacecraft carrying the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe arrived in the Saturn system on June 30, 2004.
It is one of the most ambitious missions ever launched into space. The spacecraft supports an array of powerful instruments and cameras, capable of taking accurate measurements and detailed images in a variety of atmospheric conditions and light spectrums.
The new findings were published in this week’s edition of the Icarus journal.
The Dead Sea is “an extremely salty ocean by Earth standards”, said Giuseppe Mitri of the University of Nantes in France, the paper’s lead author.
“Knowing this may change the way we view this ocean as a possible abode for present-day life, but conditions might have been very different there in the past.”
This discovery comes from a study of gravity and topography data collected over the past 10 years. Researchers found that a very high density was required for Titan’s surface ocean to explain the gravity data, which indicates that the ocean is probably an extremely salty brine of water mixed with dissolved salts, such as sulphur, sodium and potassium.
The data also showed that the thickness of Titan’s outer ice shell varies slightly from place to place. This supports the idea that the shell is in the process of freezing solid.
“Titan continues to prove itself an endlessly fascinating world. With our long-lived Cassini spacecraft, we’re unlocking new mysteries as fast as we solve old ones,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist.