[X] My Assistant

[Juramike]

Liquid Lakes confirmed on Titan!

Latest issue of Nature provides evidence that Ontario Lacus at Titan's South pole is definitely liquid.

Space.com article: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080730-titan-lake.html

-Mike

[belleraphon1]

Thanks Jason for that link to the Nature paper.....

This news article has some great VIMS images of the beach at Ontario Lacus.
http://www.dlr.de/en/desktopdefault.aspx/t.../86_read-13154/

Does VIMS have a site with updated image products?

I've walked the beaches of the Great Lakes (live near Lake Erie). Would love to walk this beach.

Craig

[Jason W Barnes]

This news article has some great VIMS images of the beach at Ontario Lacus.
http://www.dlr.de/en/desktopdefault.aspx/t.../86_read-13154/

Hey wow, that color one is one of mine, I think. Cool. Didn't realize that the European release was distinct.

Regarding the Beach, although we call it that, I don't think that it really is a beach. Geologists define a beach as "wave deposited sediments", which I'm not convinced these are. Standby for more on this; just submitted a paper to Icarus last week about what it and the outer, bright ring might be and what that means.

- VIMS Jason

[rlorenz]

Regarding the Beach, although we call it that, I don't think that it really is a beach. Geologists define a beach as "wave deposited sediments", which I'm not convinced these are. Standby for more on this; just submitted a paper to Icarus last week about what it and the outer, bright ring might be and what that means.

Or better yet, stand by for T49 when we will get altimetry on it. My guess is the whole thing
('beach' and all) will be 10^-3 or lower slope (i.e. a tidal flat) but we will see a radiometric
transition where the present 'waterline' is (presumably the residual ethane - with some amount
of methane having seasonally evaporated)

Of course, RADAR data is merely 'circumstantial' per your earlier post, maybe that isnt of
interest ....

[Juramike]

"Hey, you got SAR RADAR data in my VIMS?"
"And you got VIMS in my RADAR!"
"Oh wow! Tastes great!"
[Voiceover] "Two great flavors in one..."
(Shameless apologies to Nestle's Peanut Butter Crunch)

Unfortunately, to really nail things down, RADAR + VIMS + "something else" is probably going to be necessary to fully tease out the composition of the lakes and lakeshore.

"something else" = :

in situ GC (maybe not sufficient)
in situ GC-MS
and the Queen MacDaddy of them all, in situ stopped flow injection HPLC - 2D NMR (a 1H-13C heteronuclear correlation experiment)
lander with full suite of analytical experiments above
sample return (for the trace complex organics)

There will need to be something to figure out the mechanical properties (inferred by volume scattering) of the lakeshore stuff and some type of in situ chemical separation (the GC part) and some type of separated component analytical detection. The really hardcore stuff will be required for any funky organic species. (Unless there is a massive library of Titan-like compounds with which to try to compare analytical fingerprints discrete structures).

I think of Titan as a massive natural products isolation and determination exercise (like where they grind up some rare deep sea sponge and try to extract and determine all the bizarre molecular structures). Just figuring out one of the complex structures made by critters (palytoxin is one of the more complex ones) is usually the subject of one or more papers.

"Tholins" as a catch-all phrase still seems way too generic: it would be like referring to enzyme structures as "proteins" or other complex structures as "alkaloids".
"Hydrocarbons" or "alkanes" is equally unsatisfying. Which ones? What's the proportion?

-Mike