Headed to Titan anytime soon? Here's your weather forecast for the largest moon around Saturn. It'll be chilly, with temperatures around -200 Fahrenheit and below, and a chance of rain, so you'd better pack an umbrella. But no smoking, please, because apparently, when it precipitates on Titan, it rains methane.
From Wired Science:
Spring may bring methane showers to the deserts of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently saw a large, dark puddle appear in the wake of a storm cloud at the moon’s dune-filled equator.
“It’s the only easy way to explain the observations,” said planetary scientist Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, lead author of a study March 18 in Science. “We’re pretty confident that it has just rained on Titan.”
Aside from Earth, Titan is the only world known to have liquid lakes, clouds and a weather cycle to move moisture between them. But on chilly Titan, where temperatures plunge to -297 degrees Fahrenheit, the frigid lakes are filled with liquid methane and ethane, not water.
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