Smog on Titan & Water on Mars

[Tuckerfan]

Scientists deny that the Huygens probe somehow landed in L. A. by mistake.

Titan’s atmosphere is remarkably like Earth’s, but even more complex and multilayered, according to results from the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe.

The lander also saw signs of lightning and found chemical clues to the source of Titan’s methane, which probably bubbles up from deep inside Saturn’s giant moon.

But the very presence of methane is a puzzle – it is destroyed in the stratosphere by sunlight, forming the orange smog of more complex organic molecules which eventually settles to the ground. This means the methane is being replenished from an unknown source.

In response to NASA’s announcement of ice on Mars, astronauts request to be able to take tequila, margarita mix and a blender on any missions to the red planet.

Johnson and colleagues have now revealed subsurface measurements of two regions in the planet’s northern hemisphere – the mid-latitude lowlands called Chryse Planitia and the northern polar cap.

They believe a 250-kilometre-wide circular structure that lies between 1.5 and 2.5 kilometres below the surface of Chryse Planitia is an impact crater that was buried with volcanic ash or soil several billion years ago. The team sees no radar boundaries in material that fills the bowl of the crater and the radar signals lose little strength when passing through it. That suggests the infill must contain a large proportion of ice, which is nearly transparent to radar.

Substantial amounts of ice in the soil would make sense given the crater’s location in what appears to be a basin where ancient rivers once converged. “If the water could be captured in a basin and preserved for several billion years, it may still be there,” says Plaut.

[Evil_Captor]

Somebody is already polluting other planets and moons? That’s OUR job, dammit!!!