Show Date: November 16 , 2004

GIANT ROBOT SPACE SHIP
Pam Eastlick for the Marianas Variety

Greetings everyone and welcome to our new column Deep News. You can hear more on these subjects and many others every week on The Deep with Jim Sullivan every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. on Newstalk K-57. This week, Jim is on Tinian searching for Amelia Earhart and we’re expecting big things. Don’t miss The Deep this week.

MYSTERY MOON
The giant robot spaceship Cassini has wheeled into orbit around the ringed planet, Saturn and already it’s generating more questions than it’s answering. Saturn has a big moon called Titan that’s the second largest moon in the solar system. How big is it? It’s bigger than the planet Mercury.
Titan is also the only moon with a thick atmosphere. It’s made mostly of nitrogen just like Earth’s air, but Titan isn’t Earth-like. For one thing, it’s incredibly cold, around –300 degrees and the atmosphere is so dense and cloudy that we’ve never seen the surface.
Early next year, Cassini will drop the Huygens (pronounced Hoi-gins) remote probe into Titan’s upper clouds. Huygens will take pictures all the way down and eventually land on the surface. But will it land?
Cassini’s taken radar pictures of Titan’s surface several times to find the best place for the Huygens probe and the photos don’t reveal much except light and dark patches. Titan is apparently covered with hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons like ethane and methane are the building blocks for the amino acids necessary for our kind of life.

It’s cold enough on Titan that methane can be a liquid and one of the dark patches spotted by Cassini might be a big lake of liquid methane mixed with liquid propane. So Huygens may not land, it may float for a while and then sink. The scientists who built Huygens are prepared for this and we may get some wonderful underwater (oops!) undermethane shots.
Scientists also think a shiny white patch they see just may be a volcano. But this one wouldn’t erupt molten rock. Titan probably has a rocky core completely surrounded by water, but at –300 degrees, it sure isn’t an ocean. On Titan, water is just another kind of rock. But tidal stresses caused by Saturn’s gravity could cause some interior heating. On Titan, it’s possible that if there are volcanoes, they erupt . . . molten water.
Titan is like a murder mystery with very few clues. Keep reading Deep News for the next revelation!
They just keep on ticking
And speaking of robots and mysteries, our latest emissaries to the planet Mars, the robot explorers Spirit and Opportunity are going strong. Opportunity is still in Endurance crater and her drivers are now looking for another way out. She returned some astounding pictures of the steep slope she was on, but she may have to leave Endurance the way she came in.
Spirit is on the other side of the planet, and beginning to show her age. She’s got a creaky wheel and both rovers are losing power as Martian dust slowly covers their solar panels.
And that’s where the mystery comes in. Earlier this month, Spirit’s solar panels began producing 3% to 5% more energy when the Sun came up than they produced the day before. Scientists were pleasantly surprised but totally mystified.
About the only thing that could have caused it is that overnight. one of Mars’ many dust devils passed over Spirit and provided a little maid service. Of course, I prefer my fantasy of the little red ball of fur with the tentacles holding a bottle of glass cleaner and a squeegee but I guess I’ll buy dust devils.
Don’t forget to listen to The Deep tomorrow night, 6:00 p.m. on Newstalk K-57.