Earth & Titan

NASA JPL scientists look for Earthly examples of the terrain features they’ve been seeing on Saturn’s moon Titan, including the dry landscapes of Death Valley, California. From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Since we’re probably never going to get to the surface of Titan and be able to pick up the rocks and take samples of the liquid, we wanted to be able to understand a place that we can get to, and then draw conclusions about Titan. We believe that geology is geology everywhere. So we’ve come to Death Valley, to Racetrack Playa. It’s a dry lake right now, but it’s a lake nonetheless; so we can look for similar pieces of evidence. The reason we do that is we can crawl around Death Valley and measure things. We could find out what’s happening and find out what causes that evidence to occur. And it’s just like a detective game from there on. So whenever you have a high thing next to a low thing, you can be sure that something’s going to happen. Nature likes to even itself out. On Ontario Lacus, we have high things right next to low things. So the rainfall is going to move the material from the high to the low and it’s going to form these same alluvial fans where material washes out from the gully like it does here, and it’s going to flow the material down to the lakebed. At Ontario Lacus, there are pieces of bedrock like this, only probably made out of water ice, that make fingers that extend down into the lake. It’s as though the lake had risen up and flooded those

Related posts:

  1. Scientists measure changing lake depths on Titan
  2. Caltech scientists measure changing lake depths on Titan | e
  3. Saturn’s Moon ‘Titan’ Chemically Resembles Ancient Earth
  4. Is That Saturn’s Moon Titan or Utah?
  5. Why Earth Science

{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }

afs293 July 19, 2010 at 6:27 pm

@300tunes he’s an atheist

300tunes July 19, 2010 at 6:56 pm

@afs293 Well looks like he is not.. In a documentary he said that *God* sometimes throws the dice where we can’t see it and some stuff. Didn’t fully listen to it but, was focusing on the event horizon ect.

wiz9496 July 19, 2010 at 6:59 pm

@kjordon1 Did God tell you to believe the scriptures? No, humans did. I don’t respect people who blindly believe the bible. I also don’t respect people who are certain God doesn’t exist. They say evolution is proof He doesn’t exist. I believe in evolution, but I also believe it is the work of God.

Borridd July 19, 2010 at 7:19 pm

A video about a moon on Jupiter somehow turns into a creationist/atheist debate. Good lord.

Danno21F July 19, 2010 at 8:49 pm

Fascinating.

UBweaty July 20, 2010 at 1:15 am

Boring guy talks about dirt! WOOT

didjabringadidjalong July 20, 2010 at 7:21 am

@300tunes
I think he was referring to Einstein (God doesn’t play dice) in relation to quantum mechanics. And neither of them believed in a deity, they refer to Spinoza’s God at best. Which makes them atheists. They’re just not negative materialists.
I’m still taking Kant’s side on this.

2CSST2 July 20, 2010 at 11:56 am

@300tunes hawking believes at best in a God which would be the sum of the physics laws and their interconnection, the fact he refers it as God has nothing to do with the supernatural.

2CSST2 July 20, 2010 at 11:56 am

@MrMarleyz Yep, mass psycosis: Religion

729Drew July 20, 2010 at 4:31 pm

@Borrid

Every video seems to turn into that debate, it’s why cool channels like SpaceRip should disable comments on their vids

galacticbutterfly1 July 21, 2010 at 5:38 am

Planetary science is cool!

didjabringadidjalong July 21, 2010 at 6:01 am

@729Drew
or ‘pending approval’, so we could still ask questions and have a nice civil debate on, well, the pure win and awesomeness of star trekking.

Ikymay July 21, 2010 at 8:34 am

suckers geology is not geology everywhere, because GEO means EARTH!!!
would be titanology or something like that

munerius July 21, 2010 at 8:36 am

@Ikymay hehe, yea u right

MegaHazzer123 July 22, 2010 at 3:06 pm

@Ikymay please shut up

karadan100 July 22, 2010 at 3:48 pm

I really love SpaceRip.

xXBeach July 23, 2010 at 11:38 am

@PeskyPanda But thats just it, people say the same thing as you, but what you’re not getting is that there is ACTUAL proof, theres proof that there are thousands of earth like planets, proof that liquid water exists on other planets JUST in our solar system. yes, you are right theres no single piece of evidence that explains the big bang theory. But i mean c’mon, you’d have to look in the other direction not to put the thousands of pieces together and still believe theres a god.

didjabringadidjalong July 24, 2010 at 8:44 am

@xXBeach
” yes, you are right theres no single piece of evidence that explains the big bang theory.”
Explains or supports? Because the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is pretty compelling evidence in favor of the Big Bang theory.

TruthNotReligion July 26, 2010 at 12:32 am

“Since we’re probably never going to get to the surface of Titan…”

What a depressing way to start this video off. I’ve come to rely on these videos for uplifting sentiments about humanity and how it can touch whatever it reaches for…even if it takes hundreds of years, thousands of years…we’ll make it, damn it.

We need to look farther ahead to the future, I guess.

Leave a Comment

Previous post: Using Earth as a test case to find its exoplanet counterpart

Next post: Just how much space crap is circling the Earth? THIS much!