Cassini has found a giant lake, with island, at Titan's north pole. You can view the image and read the article here.

Amazing stuff!!

__________________
"Yes...! To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance...was just something that happened to other people, wasn't it??"

Thanks that just made my day! That has got to be one of the coolest things I have ever saw.

__________________
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit."
Stephen Hawking

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein

Yes, very cool. Does the Polar Bear Club know about this yet?

Regardless, great news.

__________________
Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

I wonder how long it will be before Brad Guth starts seeing bridges airports and other signs of intelligent life

I wonder how big the waves get, and if there are whitecaps....

__________________
"Yes...! To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance...was just something that happened to other people, wasn't it??"

I don't see anyone surfing on titan any time soon!

__________________
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit."
Stephen Hawking

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein

Well, at -290 degrees Fahrenheit, it would be.

__________________
"Yes...! To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance...was just something that happened to other people, wasn't it??"

It's too bad we didn't have some inkling of this before, otherwise we could have landed Hyugens in this lake.

It does open the doors for further probes. Would there be low/high tides, due to Saturn's gravity and that of the other moons?

__________________
"Yes...! To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance...was just something that happened to other people, wasn't it??"

...and we would have gotten no data from the surface, since the probe would have sunk like a rock!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Well...truth be told, I'm kinda happy it landed where it did. Designed to float and able to float aren't necessarily the same thing. It would be just our luck that turbulent lake surface would have screwed with the transmissions from the lander, and with the headaches we already had with one datachannel being off, it was just as well we didn't run into other complications.

__________________
I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

It's a giant lake of liquid natural gas. A sample return mission could land in it and use it as rocket fuel. It would need to bring its own oxident however.

even if Huygens couldn't actually survive landing on the surface of this lake, just think of the cool pictures on the way down..

__________________
"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Well, even off-shore would have been nice, although I wonder how much you could really have seen of the lake.

Seriously-I wonder about whitecaps. I wish there was some way we could tell. Obviously, the northern latitudes are very stormy, given that huge cloud over Titan's north pole.

__________________
"Yes...! To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance...was just something that happened to other people, wasn't it??"

That link does not seem to be working for me. Does anyone have an alternate link?

Did some looking. Is this the image we are discussing?

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedi...m?imageID=2502

It wouldn't have sunk. Huygens was designed to float in liquid methane, for just such eventuality.

__________________
Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Fantastic news! I wonder what they'll call them.

UT piece.

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I see a set of tire tracks running right through the center of that image: picture

__________________
°
°
My invisible elf ??? Why he is made of dark matter and lives off of dark energy !!!
°
°

From the ground, not much, but the shots coming in would have been jaw dropping.

__________________
I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

I did not know that! Not the first time my memory has failed me.

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson