THE Cassini spacecraft has found a giant methane-spewing volcano on Saturn’s moon Titan.
Before Cassini, the methane in Titan’s atmosphere was taken as evidence that there must be oceans of liquid methane to replenish it in the air. However, both the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens probe, which landed on Titan in January, saw no reflections from the moon’s surface that would be typical of liquid surfaces, virtually ruling out oceans of methane.
Now, Cassini’s infrared camera has peered through Titan’s hazy atmosphere and spotted a large dome-like structure, 30 kilometres across. Christophe Sotin of the University of Nantes in France and his colleagues have analysed…
