Abstract
Saturn’s giant moon Titan is unique among moons in our Solar System. As JPL’s Karl Mitchell shows us, it is the only one to have a dense atmosphere, the second thickest among the solid bodies in the Solar System. Its opaque Nitrogen-Methane blanket, although much colder than those of the atmosphere-laden rocky planets of Earth, Venus and Mars, is nonetheless imbued with clouds of liquid ethane whose rains fill rivers and seas of methane/ethane brews.
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Acknowledgment
This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Mitchell, K.L. (2013). Exotic Seas: Liquid Alkanes on Titan’s Surface. In: Carroll, M., Lopes, R. (eds) Alien Seas. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7473-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7473-9_8
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