| Awright! Put 'em out! |
THE European robot lab Huygens had found liquid methane on the Saturn satellite Titan, a chemical that seemed to have shaped the moon's peculiar landscape and weather system, scientists said overnight. "We've got a flammable world. It's quite extraordinary," said University of Honolulu researcher Toby Owen, referring to methane's combustibility with air on Earth. "There is liquid on Titan. It has been raining not long ago, there is liquid methane," said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, director of the Huygens mission at the European Space Agency (ESA). "There are truly remarkable processes at work on Titan's surface," he said.US researcher Marty Tomasko, of the University of Arizona, said the data sent back by Huygens showed "many familiar earthlike processes: abrasion, erosion, precipitation". "On the place where we landed, it had been raining not long ago, maybe two days ago," Mr Tomasko said at a presentation to the press at ESA headquarters in Paris. The rain - not water but liquid methane, which is toxic to humans - causes soil to run down from the hills and forms the rivulets and gullies that were visible in the raw images of Titan, shown to the world last week. Huygens, a 319kg craft fitted with cameras, atmospheric sensors and gas analysers, landed on Titan on January 14, sending back data to a US mothership, Cassini. Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn, was chosen as, intriguingly, it is the only moon in the solar system that has a substantial atmosphere. Its thick mix of nitrogen and methane is suspected to be undergoing chemical reactions similar to those that unfolded on Earth billions of years ago. That process eventually provided the conditions for life on our planet.
The mission, the farthest landing from Earth ever attempted, was "exploration as well as science", said ESA's director of science, David Southwood, who described it as "the most wonderful event in my career". At best, scientists had hoped Huygens would keep transmitting for three brief minutes after hitting Titan's surface. Instead, they said, instruments probably continued to function for at least three hours after the 15km/h touchdown. The only flaw in the mission was the loss of one of two data channels that were used to relay the findings home via Cassini. Instead of 700 images being sent back, only about 350 were received, showing a fog-strewn orange-tinged planet surface. On Thursday, a study published in the British journal Nature reported that Cassini, carrying Huygens, ran into major dust storms as it raced towards its rendezvous with Saturn last year. The microscopic grains smashed into Cassini with an impact speed of more than 100km per second (360,000km/h).