Space submarine cartoon6/24/2023 ![]() Life as we know it requires liquid water, and scientists think you need some sort of liquid – like liquid methane – to coax life into existence. It would probe the chemistry and geology of a world that, in certain ways, is more similar to Earth than any other place in the Solar System.īut what lies beneath is especially tantalising. It would study the weather and the shorelines, searching for signs of sea level change and clues about Titan’s climate history. The sub would survey the sediments that settled on the sea floor, and sample how the chemistry of the sea may be changing with depth. The Mars Opportunity rover, in contrast, has gone fewer than 45km – and it’s been operating for 12 years. But that ability to explore many locations and environments is a submarine’s big advantage. So far, they’ve come up with a six-metre-long vessel that would spend 90 days traversing 3,000 kilometres of Kraken Mare, cruising at an average speed of just 1km/h. Last year, researchers finished the first stage of designing what such a vehicle might look like. They had no idea what’s beneath the surface.” “We could send a boat, but think about when people first explored our oceans. “We don’t know what else is in there,” says Steve Oleson, an engineer at Nasa’s Glenn Research Center who’s leading the sub’s design effort. In its hunt for habitability, the submarine would be diving into uncharted waters (or, rather, methane), exploring an alien world in a completely different way. It’s unlikely that we will find alien fish swimming in Kraken Mare. And it’s where scientists want to send the Titan sub. No one is quite sure how deep it is, but it likely plunges for hundreds of metres and spans as much as 400,000 square km – five times larger than Lake Superior in North America. The prime candidates for alien abodes would be Titan’s several dozen lakes and seas, the biggest being Kraken Mare. Titan is so cold – about -180C (-292F) – that these compounds are in liquid form, creating wet environments that could maybe, just maybe, harbour life. ![]() While Earth’s seas are water, Titan’s are filled with a mixture of methane and ethane – stuff that’s normally a gas on a warmer Earth. The destination is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and the only other place in the Solar System with lots of liquid pooling on its surface. But unlike any other submarine, this one is designed to explore the depths of extraterrestrial seas. It's not a lander or a rover, but a submarine – a vehicle with an instantly recognisable torpedo shape. Among all the spacecraft designed to explore the Solar System, this one may be the coolest yet.
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