Sinister Security: Titan

NASA Designing Submarine to Explore Hydrocarbon Seas of Saturn’s Moon Titan

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Building a submarine gets tricky when the temperature drops to -300 Fahrenheit and the ocean is made of methane and ethane.

Washington State University researchers are working with NASA to determine how a submarine might work on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s many moons and the second largest in the solar system. The space agency plans to launch a real submarine into Titan seas in the next 20 years.

The researchers re-created a Titan ocean in a laboratory. They have published a paper on their work in the journal, Fluid Phase Equilibria.

Titan is of particular interest to researchers because it is similar to earth in one important way, it holds liquid. Unlike almost anywhere else in the solar system, the moon’s surface includes oceans, rivers and clouds, and like on earth, it can rain. But, instead of water, the hydrological cycle is based on methane.

Because of the possible lessons it could provide here on Earth, NASA has been studying Saturn and its moons for more than a decade with data collected from the Cassini spacecraft.

The submarine that the agency is designing will have to operate autonomously. It will need to study atmospheric and ocean conditions, move around sea beds, and hover at or below the surface. The engineering is even trickier because, unlike the nearly homogeneous water in earth-based oceans, the concentration of ethane and methane can vary dramatically in the Titan oceans and change the liquid’s density properties.

This is a WSU Methane-ethane Titan effervescence diagram. Washington State University

NASA invitation

Ian Richardson, a former graduate student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, got the chance to tackle how NASA might build a submarine for the extreme conditions. In WSU’s cryogenic lab, which studies materials at very cold temperatures, Richardson re-created the atmosphere of Titan and tested how a small heated machine might work under such conditions.

NASA’s design for a robotic submarine to explore the methane/ethane seas of Titan would arrive sometime in the 2040s to investigate the moon’s largest sea – Kraken Mare. (Click to enlarge) Image Credit: NASA/NIAC

Richardson, who holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from WSU, has had a longtime interest in space and space exploration technologies. He was WSU’s first-ever recipient of a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship, which included an internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. It was while working as an intern on a separate problem that a NASA scientist approached him with the problem of designing a submarine for Titan.

A diagram showing operational components and scientific instruments of the Titan sub. (Click to enlarge) Image Credit: NASA/NIAC

“My research just took a right turn, and I went with it,” said Richardson. “It’s a crazy experiment, and I never thought I would have had this opportunity. It’s been a very fun and challenging experimental design problem.”

Simulating Titan seas

The WSU research team built a test chamber that housed the liquid mixture at very cold temperatures to simulate the seas of Titan. They added a two-inch, cylinder-shaped cartridge heater that would approximate the heat that a submarine would create.

Kraken Mare, Titan’s largest sea, is the body in black and blue that sprawls from just below and to the right of the north pole down to the bottom. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/USGS

One of the biggest challenges for researchers was understanding bubbles in the Titan seas. Add a submarine powered by a heat-producing machine into the very cold Titan liquid, and nitrogen bubbles will form. Too many bubbles would make it hard to maneuver the ship, see, take data and manage ballast systems.

Shooting video at -300 degrees

The next big problem, said Richardson, was getting a video in difficult conditions. Their study was conducted at 60 pounds per square inch of pressure and nearly -300 degrees Fahrenheit. Richardson’s group engineered a solution using an optical device called a borescope and video camera that could withstand the low temperatures and high pressures to visualize what was going on within the test chamber.

“Those aren’t the friendliest conditions,” he said. “You have to come up with creative solutions.”

The researchers succeeded and took video footage of ethane-methane rain and snow. The group also studied the freezing temperatures for methane and ethane lakes and determined that, because of a small amount of nitrogen in the liquid, the lakes freeze at lower temperatures than would be expected: 75 Kelvin, or -324 degrees Fahrenheit, instead of 90.5 Kelvin.

“That’s a big deal,” said Richardson. “That means you don’t have to worry about icebergs.”

The researchers are looking to continue the work with NASA to update the Titan Submarine design.

Publication: I.A. Richardson, et al., “Experimental PρT-x measurements of liquid methane-ethane-nitrogen mixtures,” Fluid Phase Equilibria, 2018; doi:10.1016/j.fluid.2018.01.023

Source: Jake Leachman, Washington State University

Sunlight glints off of Titan’s northern seas this near-infrared, color mosaic from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. NASA/JPL/Univ. Arizona/Univ. Idaho (Featured Image Caption)

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NASA Is Going to Send a Submarine to Saturn’s Sea-Covered Titan

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The majority of Earth is covered in an ocean of liquid water, but the other worlds in our Solar System are a whole lot different. Most don’t have any kind of liquid on their surface, and while we know that there is definitely a liquid ocean under the thick ice of Enceladus, it might pose a big challenge to explore.

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One of Saturn’s other moons, Titan, is one of the very few objects in the Solar System with liquid right out in the open, and NASA is targeting its seas for a future mission that will send a submarine to explore what lies below.

The biggest challenge for NASA engineers is dealing with the fact that the massive bodies of liquid aren’t water at all, but hydrocarbons such as super-cooled methane. A new paper describing the ongoing research into the potential makeup of the seas, and how NASA’s submarine would need to be designed in order to actually survive in them, was just published in the journal Fluid Phase Equilibria.

“NASA is designing an unmanned submarine to explore the hydrocarbon rich seas of Saturn’s moon Titan,” the researchers write. “Titan is the only known celestial body in our solar system other than Earth with stable liquid seas on its surface. The thermodynamic properties of Titan’s seas have not been well characterized. This work investigates the solubility of nitrogen in varying liquid methane-ethane compositions and the effects of dissolved nitrogen on the density of the sea.”

The team, made up of scientists from the Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research (HYPER) Laboratory at Washington State University, simulated the incredibly frigid temperatures and intense pressure that a vehicle would have to endure while exploring Titan’s seas. They found that observing and recording visual data would be a huge hurdle, as most camera technology simply wouldn’t survive the harsh conditions.

They got around this by using a tool called a borescope, which uses a long, thick cord or rigid tube. The tube acts like an extended optical relay system, and as light enters it travels down the tube before it strikes the objective lens that turns it into an actual image that can be viewed through the eyepiece or, in this case, captured, recorded, and relayed back to Earth. Because the lens itself is separated from the tip of the optical relay it can be protected from the harsh conditions outside the submarine.

There’s still a lot of work to be done before NASA can move forward with its planned mission, but with an actual launch date still two decades away there’s plenty of time to get it right. At least now we know it’ll have functional eyes.

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New Map Of Moon Titan Reveals It Has A Sea Level Similar To Earth

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Ligeia Mare, a look at the second largest known body of liquid on the Surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Titan, Saturn’s giant satellite, is more Earth-like than previously thought.

Previous observations have shown that Titan has a dense atmosphere and stable liquid on its surface.

Of course, its seas and lakes are not made of water, but methane and ethane.

Now, researchers have found a new way in which this distant alien satellite looks disturbingly like our planet: it has sea level, a constant average elevation in relation to gravitational attraction.

The new study, based on data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, finds that Titan’s seas are constantly rising relative to their gravitational pull, just like Earth’s oceans.

It seems that the smallest lakes on Titan appear at elevations several hundred meters higher than sea level.

On Earth, lakes are also commonly found at high altitudes.

The highest lake navigable by large ships, the Titicaca, located at more than 3,700 meters above sea level.

The new study suggests that elevation is important because Titan’s liquid bodies appear to be connected below the surface in something like an aquifer system on Earth.

The hydrocarbons seem to flow below the surface of the moon in a similar way as water flows through porous underground rock or gravel on our planet, which means that nearby lakes communicate with each other and share a common liquid level.

A rendered size-comparison sheet between the Planet Earth, the Moon, and Saturn’s Moon Titan. Image Credit: Shutterstock.

“We’re measuring the elevation of a liquid surface on another body 10 astronomical units away from the sun to an accuracy of roughly 40 centimeters,” explains Alex Hayes, of Cornell University.

“Because we have such amazing accuracy we were able to see that between these two seas the elevation varied smoothly about 11 meters, relative to the center of mass of Titan, consistent with the expected change in the gravitational potential. We are measuring Titan’s geoid. This is the shape that the surface would take under the influence of gravity and rotation alone, which is the same shape that dominates Earth’s oceans.”

Much of the study was based on the data obtained by the Cassini radar instrument.

A new topographic map published in Geophysical Research Letters offered new insight into Titan.

The map exposed several new features on Titan, including new mountains, none of more than 700 meters in elevation.

It also offered a global view of the highs and lows of its topography, which allowed scientists to confirm that two places in the equatorial region of Titan which are in fact depressions that could be ancient dry seas or cryovolcanic flows.

The map also revealed that Titan is a bit more flattened than previously known, suggesting that there is more variability in the thickness of its crust than previously thought.

Despite the fact that we have learned much about Titan in recent years, only 9 percent of Titan has been mapped in high-resolution, while around 30 percent was imaged in lower resolution.

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Something Weird! Very Weird Is Happening on Saturn’s Moon Titan

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Thanks to the efforts of NASA and its incredibly reliable Cassini spacecraft, we now know more about Saturn and its moons than ever before, but it seems there are still some surprises in store for scientists studying the planet and its natural satellites. New research by scientists at the University of Bristol has revealed an interesting quirk with Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and it flies in the face of everything science has predicted. It seems that Titan’s Polar Regions have a rather unpredictable personality, and observations made by Cassini have shown that an expected hot spot near Titan’s pole had rapidly turned into a frigid polar vortex. This stood in contrast to what previous observations suggested, especially considering the same spot had been seemingly getting hotter as recently as late 2009. Now, researchers think they have an explanation.

The current best guess for the strange behavior of Titan’s pole is that chemicals in its atmosphere are responsible for the chilly trend.

“For the Earth, Venus, and Mars, the main atmospheric cooling mechanism is infrared radiation emitted by the trace gas CO2 and because CO2 has a long atmospheric lifetime it is well mixed at all atmospheric levels and is hardly affected by atmospheric circulation,” Dr Nick Teanby, lead author of the study, explains. “However, on Titan, exotic photochemical reactions in the atmosphere produce hydrocarbons such as ethane and acetylene, and nitriles including hydrogen cyanide and cyanoacetylene, which provide the bulk of the cooling.”

Using a model based on data gathered by Cassini, the team was able to demonstrate that the incredibly unique mix of chemicals over the polar region could indeed result in sharp temperature drops and extremely frigid atmospheric temperatures.

The study, which was published in Nature Communications, points out that while the behavior of Titan is particularly odd to us, the same thing might be happening on exoplanets and other moons outside of our Solar System. The research could help inform further study of those far-away worlds in the long term.

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Cassini Finds Saturn Moon Has 'Sea Level' Like Earth

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Saturn’s moon Titan may be nearly a billion miles away from Earth, but a recently published paper based on data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft reveals a new way this distant world and our own are eerily similar. Just as the surface of oceans on Earth lies at an average elevation that we call “sea level,” Titan’s seas also lie at an average elevation.

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This is the latest finding that shows remarkable similarities between Earth and Titan, the only other world we know of in our solar system that has stable liquid on its surface. The twist at Titan is that its lakes and seas are filled with hydrocarbons rather than liquid water, and water ice overlain by a layer of solid organic material serves as the bedrock surrounding these lakes and seas.

The new paper, led by Alex Hayes at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, finds that Titan’s seas follow a constant elevation relative to Titan’s gravitational pull -- just like Earth’s oceans. Smaller lakes on Titan, it turns out, appear at elevations several hundred feet, or meters, higher than Titan’s sea level. Lakes at high elevation are commonly found on Earth. The highest lake navigable by large ships, Lake Titicaca, is over 12,000 feet [3,700 meters] above sea level.

The new study suggests that elevation is important because Titan’s liquid bodies appear to be connected under the surface in something akin to an aquifer system at Earth. Hydrocarbons appear to be flowing underneath Titan’s surface similar to the way water flows through underground porous rock or gravel on Earth, so that nearby lakes communicate with each other and share a common liquid level.

The paper was based on data obtained by Cassini’s radar instrument until just months before the spacecraft burned up in the Saturn atmosphere last year. It also used a new topographical map published in the same issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

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Potential Ingredient for Alien Life Found On Titan

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A molecule that could help build otherworldly life is present on Saturn’s moon Titan, researchers have discovered.

Vinyl cyanide, a compound predicted to form membrane like structures, is created in Titan’s upper atmosphere, scientists report July 28 in Science Advances. There’s enough vinyl cyanide (C2H3CN) in the moon’s liquid methane seas to make about 10 million cell-like balls per cubic centimeter of ocean, researchers calculate. On Earth, about a million bacteria are found in a cubic centimeter of ocean water near shore.

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“It’s very positive news for putative-Titan-life studies,” says Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who was not involved in the new study.

Titan has no water, usually considered a prerequisite for life. Instead of water, freezing-cold Titan has liquid methane. There’s even a methane cycle that mimics Earth’s water cycle (SN: 3/21/15, p. 32). But Titan is so cold — usually about –178° Celsius — that the smallest unit of life on Earth, the cell, would shatter in the moon’s subzero seas.

In 2015, Lunine and Cornell colleagues James Stevenson and Paulette Clancy proposed a way life might exist in methane. Computer simulations predicted that vinyl cyanide (also called acrylonitrile or propenenitrile) could make flexible bubbles called azotosomes that would be stable in liquid methane (SN: 4/30/16, p. 28). Those bubbles might act much as cell membranes do on Earth, sheltering genetic material and concentrating biochemical reactions needed for life.

When the Cornell researchers suggested the presence of azotosomes on Titan, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen had already been detected in abundance in the moon’s atmosphere. But no one knew whether those atoms joined to make vinyl cyanide there. The Saturn probe Cassini had detected a molecule of the right mass to be vinyl cyanide, but couldn’t definitively identify the molecule’s chemical makeup.

But evidence for the chemical compound was buried in archived data from a large radio telescope, Maureen Palmer of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and colleagues discovered. Palmer, an astrochemistry and astrobiology researcher, combed data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile between February 22 and May 27, 2014.

Astronomers point ALMA at Titan to calibrate the telescope because the moon has known brightness levels, says Palmer, who also works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The team used that calibration data to detect the signature of vinyl cyanide at specific wavelengths of light and calculate its abundance.

“This is a pretty secure detection,” says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md.

Even with confirmation of vinyl cyanide, researchers can’t say that azotosomes form on Titan. That’s probably not something telescopes can determine, Lunine says. A probe would need to sample Titan’s seas to detect the structures.

And even detecting azotosomes would not mean there’s life on Titan, says Lorenz. The moon’s extreme cold may hamper metabolism. What’s more, no one knows whether liquid methane can take the place of water for supporting life, he says. “If I were a betting man, I’d say Titan does not have life.”

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Future Space Colony on Titan?

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Saturn's Largest Moon Titan Has Enough Energy to Run a Colony of 300 MILLION People

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If we're going to go out beyond our home planet and begin construction of colonies somewhere else, then one of the vital resources we're going to require is energy – and a new study says Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, has plenty of it.

Actually Titan has sufficient energy sources to keep the lights on for a colony the size of the United States, scientists say, including choices for nuclear power, solar power, wind power and hydropower.

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Amanda Hendrix from the Planetary Science Institute and Yuk Yung from the California Institute of Technology utilized the details we think we know about Titan and some math based on related technologies here on Earth to come up with their deductions.

"Once propulsion challenges are overcome, allowing humans to travel great distances quickly without incurring significant radiation damage, Saturn's moon Titan is the optimal location in the solar system for an off-Earth human settlement," write the scientists.

That colony would have to be self-sustaining, as Titan sits about 1.3 billion kilometers (808 million miles) away from Earth, but it has the potential to be used as a platform for missions that go even deeper into space. Early robotic voyagers could use nuclear power and radioactive decay as an energy source, and that might work for humans too, if we took up sufficient kit to build a plant and excavated materials from the moon itself.

At the moment however, Titan's geology is too much of an enigma to be sure the nuclear power would work. What we do know is that there's adequate supply of methane on Titan – oceans of the stuff – which could deliver rocket fuel as well as hydropower options. While the low-lying seas and absence of rain mean rivers aren't frequently found on the moon, tidal power is a likelihood.

Scientists have detected strong tides on Titan, produced by the enormous pull of Saturn, and those tidal changes all get pressed through a small channel called Seldon Fretum or the Throat of the Kraken.

"The Throat of Kraken is basically the Strait of Gibraltar. We're pretty sure there's a very strong flow of liquid back and forth every Titan day. If you want reliable power that you know is going to be accessible, that's where I would go." planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz from Johns Hopkins University, who wasn't involved in the research, toldNew Scientist.

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Although Titan is nearly 10 times further away from the Sun than the Earth is, solar power is a choice according to the scientists behind the new study – as long as we can construct sufficient panels. The brightest a Titan day ever gets is same as dusk on Earth, but Hendrix and Yung believe a solar farm as big as the surface area of the United States would be capable of supporting as many as 300 million people.

As for wind power, Titan does have powerful winds in its upper atmosphere, according to calculation made by the Huygens probe. At the instant however, we don't have the technology to construct floating wind turbines that could get up that high. Certainly, one of the study's running themes is the need to improve the technology we have here on Earth, from solar panels to turbines, ready for use on other planets. With hydrocarbon fuels pretty much out of the question due to the lack of oxygen needed to burn them, we're going to have to depend on these other options to maitain a base on Titan.

The study authors accept that they've skipped over some details in their work – we just don't know that much about Titan right now – but their study is a useful first step in working out how to make life livable up on Saturn's largest moon. And the initial signs are that Titan has sufficient natural resources to keep us going.

"While temperature, gravity and wind conditions on Titan mean that energy production efficiencies are generally lower than on Earth, Titan's wealth of natural resources nevertheless imply that energy production on Titan is a significant possibility," conclude the researchers.

The findings are due to be published in the Journal of Astrobiology and Outreach but until then can be found on the pre-print website arXiv.org.