A news release has just appeared http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-172 concerning the discovery of possible 'tropical lakes' in the Shangri La area. A report will appear in Nature today. The area of Shangri La appears in the VIMS map below
Click to view attachment

Machi's labeled version of VP's radar swath's map (figure below) of the above VIMS Shangri La map will be of interest once the exact position of the VIMS lakes are published. Portions of T41 and T55 may be surrounding the area?
Click to view attachment

Nature comment: http://www.nature.com/news/tropical-lakes-...or-life-1.10824

Location map here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/...ure11165-s1.pdf

It's amazing how tough Titan is to unravel, even with a huge array of instruments. Also props to Lunine for the "caverns measureless to man" quips. Cute.

Thanks for the link and supplement page Nigel. The figure from the Nature article supplement contains the areas of suspected lakes.
The “one imaged by Radar, containing dunes (purple&inset)” (white arrow below left) caught my attention as we had an interesting post awhile back showing this area as a relative low spot in a combined T8 SAR topo image combination. (see below, right).
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
In the later animated figure the dark blue low spot contains the same "island" as is in the inset in the left figure. The Huygens landing site is also highlighted at the end of the animation.

I think, that possible existence of lakes in equatorial areas is interesting, but not surprising. Not after that storm, which was on Titan last? year.
I see similarities between our current knowledge about Titan and our knowledge about Mars in Mariner 9 time. So we can expect many "big things" about Titan in future.
(Which is fine )

Thank you for posting those images, titanicrivers. Nicely illustrates why I am extremely skeptical about all this. I just think these are areas with dark interdune material, rather than lakes.

You're not wrong machi. We're just beginning with that place. We'll have to send a whole university there eventually.

These articles remind us of the moisture found at the Huygens landing site. At the time the surface was compared with creme brulee, though later they backed off from the implications of that comparison by suggesting that the penetrometer striking and sliding off a pebble into dry sand would fit the data. Maybe it's time to resurrect the creme brulee.

Titan is place hard to understand, so we can expect almost everything.
I read one article, written before Cassini-Huygens (~2000), in which authors stated, that's existence of big dunes on Titan is highly improbable.

"At the time the surface was compared with creme brulee, though later they backed off from the implications of that comparison by suggesting that the penetrometer striking and sliding off a pebble into dry sand would fit the data."

I think, that they still talked about material soaked by methane. This was based on evaporation of methane, which was registered by GCMS.

The composition of surface vapours obtained by GCMS after landing shows that Huygens landed on a surface wet with methane, which evaporated as the cold soil was heated by the warmer probe. (from ESA)

I was initially a very strong scptic about any extraterrestrial liquids. VP's scepticism in this case must be respected. Nevertheless we have here a world where the atmospheric pressure greatly favours their presence. I could live with the idea of a thouroughly soaked Titan that is only superficially dry. An earthlike interleaving of porous and impervious materials could produce puddles in some areas while others, such as the Xanadu, are dry even though low in elevation. There could even be a correlation between oases and dunes. On this evidence both are present in Shangri-La; both are absent in Xanadu.

This appears to be a good place to ask a question I just came up with after watching the JPL Von Kamen lecture re Titan. There I first learned that Xanadu was low according the the gravitational model. However, the lecture also said that the equatorial regions are filled with ice/goop windblown dunes. How then could Xanadu NOT be filled with sand? I'd appreciate knowing if anybody has information about that.

Thanks.

We had an extended discussion about that some time ago - I'll try and find it. The bottom line is that 'sand' is not a liquid and its distribution is governed more by wind than by gravity, especially on Titan. Xanadu could be a region where the wind blows out more often than in.

Thanks, I'd appreciate reading the discussion.

Here you go: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=5953

Heck of a coincidence I was listening to this song when I first saw this thread.

@machii

Yes even though we've gotten some tantalizing peeks trough the atmosphere, our exploration of Titan are quite in the same early stages but not quite like Mariner 9 which were one orbiter, rather like the early set of flyby missions of Mars, since Cassini do not approach Titan close that often.

(And I still cannot bend my head around the word dunes, even less talk about a 'desert' - it is rather one alien and cryogenic kind of snowdrift on this moon.)