FIRST they said there were seas of liquid hydrocarbons. Then they said there were none. Now, maybe there’s a lake full of the gooey gunk. A company prospecting for oil? No, just NASA dithering over whether liquid hydrocarbons exist on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
Until recently, many scientists expected the methane in Titan’s atmosphere to come from seas, or even an ocean, of liquid hydrocarbons on the moon. And when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft arrived at Titan earlier this year and released the Huygens probe, many were hoping for a splashdown. Instead, Huygens landed on solid ground, and…
