Underground ocean of water and ammonia on Titan

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has made yet another stunning find during its tour of Saturn and its moons…evidence of an underground ocean of water and ammonia on Titan.

The new data was gathered using Cassini’s Synthetic Aperture Radar during 19 flybys of Titan since late 2005. The spacecraft’s optical cameras don’t work so well with Titan because the moon actually has a thick atmosphere and appears constantly shrouded in a smoggy haze. But the radar can penetrate through that, and scientists were able to map out the location of 50 “landmarks” like lakes, canyons and mountains.


cnn.com Sci Tech article

Seanie.

As followup, see a more technical article at Ars Technica:

An ocean may decouple Titan's crust and core

Titans surface rotation may be desychronised from the main rotation;
this may be due to an underground ocean.

Good article, with a followup pointer to the Science paper:

Science, 2008. DOI: 10.1126/science.1151639 ( dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1151639 )

Neat comparison:

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1..._at_29_km_per_px.png

Titan is more like a planet than a moon.
A Titanic beast!

Titans surface rotation may be desychronised from the main rotation;
this may be due to an underground ocean.

Now there is an interesting concept, is it the core or the planet we measure for the rotation, I would have assumed it was the crust.

The Earth’s inner core probably rotates faster than the mantle and crust:

www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home97/jan97/core.html

If there is a liquid layer between the solid core and solid crust of any sphere this would not be too surprising.

Forgot to mention.
The radio emissions from the core of Jupiter also rotate at a different rate to the visible cloud-tops:
radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/library/sci_briefs/decametric.htm