NASA’s epic Cassini mission at Saturn is still generating valuable scientific data more than three years after its demise.
Data from one of the spacecraft’s last flybys of Titan, a large moon with the precursors of life’s chemistry, reveals that a huge lake on the surface called Kraken Mare is more than 1,000 feet ( 300 meters) deep — that’s roughly the equivalent of the height of New York City’s Chrysler Building. In fact, the lake is so deep that Cassini’s radar couldn’t probe all the way to the bottom.
Back in 2014, preliminary data from this flyby suggested that Kraken Mare was at least 115 feet (35 meters) deep but extend farther; the newly released results show the lake is nearly 10 times deeper than that early estimate.