Saturn's Moon Titan May Not Have Global Ocean

A key discovery from NASA's Cassini mission in 2008 was that Saturn's largest moon Titan may have a vast water ocean below its hydrocarbon-rich surface. But reanalysis of mission data suggests a more complicated picture: Titan's interior is more likely composed of ice, with layers of slush and small pockets of warm water that form near its rocky core.

Led by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA, and published in the journal Nature on December 17, the new study could have implications for scientists' understanding of Titan and other icy moons throughout our solar system.

"This work is the first to produce a model for the interior of Titan which satisfies all of the geophysical constraints available from the Cassini-Huygens mission," says Professor of Planetary Science Jonathan Lunine (MS '83, PhD '85), who is also a co-author on the new study. "It changes our view of Titan, in which a massive liquid water ocean beneath the surface is replaced by pockets of mushy ice in an otherwise frozen mantle. Titan continues to challenge our understanding of large icy moons: How they formed, what's inside them, and what are the implications for life in these planet-sized worlds."

Read the full story from JPL here.