Ever since I was a kid watching Adventures in Paradise on TV, I’ve had a yen for islands, the more remote the better. The show had quite a pull on a young imagination, as skipper Gardner McKay sailed the waters of French Polynesia in his schooner, turning up beautiful women and adventure at most every port. The thought of someday threading through the Tuamotus or setting out for Nuku Hiva and the Marquesas made my spirit soar, and to this day my fascination with maps is undiminished.
So you can imagine how I studied the image below, and the kind of speculations it triggered. Because when you look at a map, you try to put yourself there in your mind, and perhaps no islands are more challenging to imagine than the ones pictured here. The work of San Diego middle school teacher Peter Minton (and thanks to Frank Taylor for the pointer), they’re based on Cassini imagery peering through the murk of Titan’s atmosphere at what seems to be an island group in a methane sea. Assuming, of course, that the methane/ethane mix is something more than sludge, but this is where the imagination has its own work to do.
And here is the image from which Minton worked:
Minton normally works with satellite photos of out of the way islands here on Earth, like Isla Alboran in the Mediterranean or Nukutavake Island in the aforementioned Tuamotus. Anyone with a lust for distant ports of call will want to bookmark his site. The idea of turning to Cassini imagery is brilliant and leads me to wonder what’s next for Minton. These are substantial islands, the largest almost fifty kilometers long. Below, you can see the unnamed sea that holds the islands, a vast body of liquid methane, ethane and nitrogen about the size of Lake Superior.
From Voyager to early radar imagery of Venus and now again with the Messenger mission to Mercury, we are challenged with new landscapes and the naming of places in ways that haven’t occurred in centuries. The thought of extending our mapping to extrasolar planets through the kind of space telescopes we may be able to deploy by the end of this century is breathtaking. As always, maps fire the imagination and provoke an essential human wanderlust. One day imagery of a green and blue exoplanet may spur our efforts to make the most difficult of all voyages, using technologies we have probably not yet imagined.
NASA Cassini Image: Flowing Liquids on Titan
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=27203
“Abundant evidence for flowing liquids is seen in this image,
from sinuous, wide river channels to shorter, more chaotic
drainage patterns. The extremely dissected, rugged terrain
in the southern portion of the image has been very eroded
by flowing liquids, probably from a combination of methane
rainstorms and sapping (subsurface methane rising to erode
the surface).”
Hi Folks;
Methane oceans and rain on Titan! What a great source of fuel for chemical rockets powered by methane and LOX. The methane could be used in the production of plastics for planetary bases and space stations. The methane could be carried back to Earth in huge nuclear electric powered frieghters, solar sail craft, or PV powered ion or electron drive craft. Since so much of our infrastructure runs on hydrocarbon combustion, such huge freighters might reach earth orbit where-upon the methane would be piped down bean stalk like space elevators and used for jet planes, orbit insertion space vehicles, buses, cars, fuel cells powered vehicles etc. Such an undertaking would be a huge affair but it would be the natural gas industry’s space-head’s field day.
It is possible that the atmospheric wind and ocean wave energy on methane could be used to power beanstalk like collection mechanisms to load tankers in orbit around Titan.
I would book a port of call to Titan to see these landscapes in a heart beat.
Thanks;
Jim
What a setting for a classic SI-FI cover. Sailing a methane sea with an orange sky and a gibbous Saturn overhead.
I wonder if there are waves and methane surf? With two atmospheres of surface pressure, sound waves should be no problem. Right now, is there the noise of breakers rolling in on distant Titan shores?
Sure would be fun to stand on a beach on the shoreline and take it all in…
P.S. It’s GOT to be Mare Cassini.
Thanks for the kind words. It is always a pleasure to create a map that fires your’s and a reader’s imagination. I agree with Frank, the name of the sea should be Mare Cassini. I believe the islands should be named for map makers – Blaeu, Brahe, Hondius, Mercator, Ortelius, Roggeveen, Speed and Ptolemy reserved for the largest island within Mare Cassini. Maybe, the smallest of the islands can be called Minton. Take care and thanks again.
Peter is too modest. To honor Titan’s first cartographer, the smaller body to the west should be “Lacus Mintoni”.
I certainly agree with Frank. After all, the cartographer’s role should never be underestimated. And in any case, as we continue to explore new terrain, we’re going to need all the cartographers we can get!
awesome! the photo is now my desktop background!
And I think Mr Essig has a point! With Earth’s petroleum resources limited, how long before the cost of a barrel of oil will support a profit margin for mining excursions to Titan?
Wow! What an awesome map! I like exotic maps in general, but this kind of astronomical related map truely triggers my imagination! I agree with Frank that Peter’s map would be an excellent stage for an fantastic SF-story! Frank’s discription of a sailor on a methane sea with an orange sky and a ringed planet in the background reminds me of the imagery of the great science fiction writer Dan Simmons (famous for his Hyperion Cantos and Ilium Epos).
@ Peter Minton: Have you ever created similar maps, or is this your first one? If you’re planning on creating similar maps in the near future, I’d like to suggest a map of Mars in the distant past, when vast oceans covered the Red (then Blue) planet.
A theoretical investigation into the trapping of noble gases by clathrates on Titan
Authors: Caroline Thomas, Sylvain Picaud, Olivier Mousis, Vincent Ballenegger
(Submitted on 19 Mar 2008)
Abstract: In this paper, we use a statistical thermodynamic approach to quantify the efficiency with which clathrates on the surface of Titan trap noble gases. We consider different values of the Ar, Kr, Xe, CH4, C2H6 and N2 abundances in the gas phase that may be representative of Titan’s early atmosphere.
We discuss the effect of the various parameters that are chosen to represent the interactions between the guest species and the ice cage in our calculations. We also discuss the results of varying the size of the clathrate cages. We show that the trapping efficiency of clathrates is high enough to significantly decrease the atmospheric concentrations of Xe and, to a lesser extent, of Kr, irrespective of the initial gas phase composition, provided that these clathrates are abundant enough on the surface of Titan. In contrast, we find that Ar is poorly trapped in clathrates and, as a consequence, that the atmospheric abundance of argon should remain almost constant.
We conclude that the mechanism of trapping noble gases via clathration can explain the deficiency in primordial Xe and Kr observed in Titan’s atmosphere by Huygens, but that this mechanism is not sufficient to explain the deficiency in Ar.
Comments: Accepted for publication in Planetary and Space Science
Subjects: Astrophysics (astro-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:0803.2884v1 [astro-ph]
Submission history
From: Olivier Mousis [view email]
[v1] Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:22:48 GMT (304kb)
http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.2884