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Titan has more ‘fuel’ than Earth : What do you say? with increasing price on Earth
Posted Date: 15 Feb 2008 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: Career Guidance
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Posted By: Nitin Bajaj - Editor Member Level: Diamond
Rating:  Points: 4
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Imagine a place awash with more hydrocarbons than a Texan oilman can dream of and where no one has staked a single claim — all that energy is just going begging.
The problem: this massive reserve is at least 1.2 billion kilometres away from Earth, on a tiny inhospitable world where on a warm day it’s minus 179°C.
New findings by the mission to Titan, reported on Wednesday by the European Space Agency (ESA), say Saturn’s orange moon has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.
Methane and ethane fall like rain from the sky, forming massive lakes and seas, while complex organic molecules called tholins are believed to make up Titan’s oily dunes, ESA said in a press release.
“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material. It’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” said scientist Ralph Lorenz.
Lorenz, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is a member of a team poring over radar data sent back by the US space probe Cassini, which dispatched a European probe, Huygens, to the moon’s surface.
Understanding Titan’s carbonchemistry cookbook may unlock knowledge as to how Earth’s carbon-based life began, the researchers hope.
The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Latest Cassini mission has also revealed much about Saturn’s frigid moon Enceladus.
Among the discoveries are several in the moon’s south polar region: a series of fractures known as tiger stripes, anomalous hot spots along the fractures and jets of water vapor and icy particles spewing from the surface.
A new study ties those discoveries together. By analyzing Cassini images of the region taken from different directions over two years, researchers have been able to locate the source of some of the jets through triangulation. They report in Nature that the jets emanate from the hot spots along the tiger stripes. AFP
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