Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Mechanism for Tidal Heating on Titan

Bruce Moomaw of Spacedaily.com posted a very interesting message on the MER Forum yesterday regarding a possible mechanism for tidal heating on Titan. Bruce Bills and Francis Nimmo of Goddard Space Flight Center, UC-San Diego, and UCLA had an abstract in last years LPSC suggesting that the near 5:2 mean motion resonance between Jupiter and Saturn might be enough to maintain Titan's non-zero orbital eccentricity. This would open the door for tidal heating and subsquent cryovolcanic activity, as hinted at by RADAR and ISS data from Cassini.

Edit: I should make a correction that "Mongo" over at the MER Forum actually brought up this abstract a few weeks ago and the post by Bruce was regarding bringing that abtract up with Jonathan Lunine.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just wanted to point out that I had pointed out that same paper on the MER forum two weeks ago here: http://mer.rlproject.com/index.php?showtopic=537&st=90

Bill (Mongo)

2/01/2005 05:15:00 PM  

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