by Ken Bell

Just a few short weeks ago the disappointing news from the Cassini probe of Saturn’s moon Titan was that it had “an arid landscape” that “dash[ed] scientific hopes of rivers and oceans.”

But it seems now that judgment may have been premature, based on insufficient evidence. Just 18 short days after the preceding declaration, “NASA scientists say the Cassini spacecraft has captured a series of images that look like a lake with smooth, shoreline boundaries on Saturn’s moon Titan.” The lake, probably liquid methane, is not small. The object imaged is 145 miles long by 45 miles wide, about the size of Lake Ontario on the Canadian border.

There is, naturally some controversy. “‘It’s possible that some of the storms in this region are strong enough to make methane rain that reaches the surface,’ said Dr. Tony DelGenio of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. ‘Given Titan’s cold temperatures, it might take a long time for any liquid methane collecting on the surface to evaporate. So it might not be surprising for a methane-filled lake to persist for a long time.’”

Alternatively, the now three-week old conventional wisdom is defended by Dr. Elizabeth Tuttle of the University of Arizona, who “said the image may be of a lake that has dried up.”
We’ll see whether Titan’s great lake washes out.