14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, announce that the NASA Cassini space probe conducted a new flyby of Saturn's largest moon on Tuesday, July 24. The maneuver took the long-lived orbiter very close to the surface of Titan.
According to mission controllers, the purpose of the flyover was to put the spacecraft in a favorable position to scan the moon's surface for lakes made up of liquid hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane. Cassini has been conducting such studies for years.
The orbiter first achieved orbital insertion around Saturn on July 1, 2004. Since then, it has been surveying the gas giants, its ring system and its moons without rest, compiling a vast volume of data on each of them, while at the same time exceeding its planned mission lifetime several times over.
It was through Cassini data that scientists on Earth realized the thick, orange atmosphere surrounding this moon was also obscuring a series of lakes, clustered primarily around the two poles. Later on, experts also established that these landscape features were filled with liquid hydrocarbons.
After additional flybys (Titan conducted a total of 85 flights over Titan, including the latest one), researchers determined that all the atmospheric cycles on the celestial body use methane in very much the same way as Earth's natural cycles use water.
The new maneuver, one of the last flybys Cassini will be conducting on Saturn's moons before changing its orbit, took the spacecraft within 629 miles (1,012 kilometers) of the moon's surface.
A statement from JPL indicates that the orbiter was instructed to “look for a glint of sunlight reflecting off a methane lake.” Since most studies of Titan's surface have been conducted in radio wavelengths, experts still do not have a direct confirmation that what they are seeing are actually lakes.
Even though it zipped past the moon at a speed of around 13,000 miles (20,921 kilometers) per hour, the spacecraft is thought to have had enough time to collect the relevant data, Space reports.
Cassini is currently scheduled to remain in active operations until at least 2017, after ending its primary science mission in 2008. It launched from Earth carrying the European Space Agency's (ESA) Huygens lander in 1997, and arrived at Saturn about 7 years later.