Image:TitanSeaComparison.jpg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Copy to Commons This is a candidate to be copied to the Wikimedia Commons. Appropriately licensed media are more accessible to other Wikimedia projects if placed on Commons. Any user may perform this move - please see Moving images to the Commons for more information.

Please remove this tag after this image has been copied to Commons.

Copy to Commons via CommonsHelper

Source: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09184


This side-by-side image shows a Cassini radar image (on the left) of what is the largest body of liquid ever found on Titan's north pole, compared to Lake Superior (on the right). This close-up is part of a larger image (see PIA09182) and offers strong evidence for seas on Titan. These seas are most likely liquid methane and ethane. This feature on Titan is at least 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles), which is greater in extent than Lake Superior (82,000 square kilometers or 32,000 square miles), which is Earth's largest surface area lake. The feature covers a greater fraction of Titan than the largest terrestrial inland sea, the Black Sea. The Black Sea covers 0.085 percent of the surface of the Earth; this newly observed body on Titan covers at least 0.12 percent of the surface of Titan. Because of its size, scientists are calling it a sea.

The image on the right is from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) project, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, Md.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC

Licensing



 This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". ( NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy)


Warnings:

  • Use of NASA logos, insignia and emblems are restricted per US law 14 CFR 1221.
  • The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/ Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not in the public domain.
  • Materials from the Hubble Space Telescope may be copyrighted if they do not explicitly come from the STScI.
  • All materials created by the SOHO probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use.
  • Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted.

File history

Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.

Date/Time Dimensions User Comment
current 07:01, 14 March 2007 604×357 (36 KB) Yalbik ( Talk | contribs) ({{PD-USGov-NASA}})

    See the setup instructions for more information.

The following file is a duplicate of this file:

The following pages on Schools Wikipedia link to this image (list may be incomplete):
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:TitanSeaComparison.jpg"
This Wikipedia Selection is sponsored by SOS Children , and is a hand-chosen selection of article versions from the English Wikipedia edited only by deletion (see www.wikipedia.org for details of authors and sources). See also our Disclaimer.