caves

Picture a world where rain falls, gathers in lakes and ponds, seeps into the surrounding rock, and evaporates away, only to fall again. There’s just one catch: The world is Saturn’s moon, Titan, where the rain isn’t water; it’s liquid methane. Two new papers explore how this eerily familiar, waterless “water cycle” manifests on Titan’s surface. To do so, two separate research teams turned to data from the Cassini mission, which ended its stay at the Saturn system in September 2017. The spacecraft flew past the massive moon more than 100 times, gathering crucial observations of this strange world as … Read more