WASHINGTON—NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its icy moons, including the majestic Titan, ended its mission with a death plunge into the giant ringed planet in 2017. But some of the voluminous data gathered by Cassini during its 13 years of surveying the Saturnian system is only now being fully examined.
Cassini’s radar observations are providing intriguing new details about the seas of liquid hydrocarbons on the surface of Titan, our solar system’s second-largest moon and a place of interest in the search for life beyond Earth.
Titan, shrouded in a smog-like orange haze, is the only known world other than Earth exhibiting liquid seas on the surface, though they are not composed of water but rather nitrogen and the organic compounds methane and ethane, components of natural gas....
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