Titan's Lapping Oil Waves When the European Huygens probe on the
Cassini space mission parachutes down through the opaque smoggy
atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan early next year, it may find
itself splashing into a sea of liquid hydrocarbons. In what is
probably the first piece of "extraterrestrial oceanography" ever
carried out, Dr Nadeem Ghafoor of Surrey Satellite Technology
and Professor John Zarnecki of the Open University, with Drs
Meric Srokecz and Peter Challenor of the Southampton
Oceanography Centre, calculated how any seas on Titan would
compare with Earth's oceans. Their results predict that waves
driven by the wind would be up to 7 times higher but would move
more slowly and be much farther apart. The team worked with a
computer simulation, or 'model', that predicts how wind-driven
waves on the surface of the sea are generated on Earth, but they
changed all the basic inputs, such as the local gravity, and the
properties of the liquid, to values they might expect on Titan.
|The haze of an atmosph