Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 22, 2017

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REAL LIFE NEWS: TITAN HAS METHANE STORMS THAT CARVE INTO THE ICY SURFACE

by Hazed

It looks like I may have to make more alterations to the locations on Titan, to add a new meteorological feature – methane monsoons.

This kind of severe weather doesn’t happen often, but when it does, torrents of liquid methane flood onto the surface and carve their way through the moon’s icy surface.

Previously, it was thought that these storms happened about once every thousand years, but new evidence leads scientists to think that they actually happen about once every Titan year – that’s 29.5 Earth years. Since Fed has been going for just about that long, you would expect the mobiles on the moon to have experienced one of these monster storms.

The models of the storms that researchers Jonathan Mitchell and Sean Faulk have built show a foot of rain a day, comparable to that seen on Earth in the recent Hurricane Harvey.

When the storms hit, this intense methane rain floods onto the surface and flows around mountains and hills, and through canyons. The methane flow picks up bits of sand and sediment and deposits it elsewhere. This erosion produces triangular patterns known as alluvial fans, which are also seen on Earth and Mars.

This new information comes from the Cassini probe’s observations. It didn’t actually see a storm happening – they aren’t that frequent, and it only observed the moon during three of its seasons. We need more missions to Titan to see the storms in action.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/intense-methane-rainstorms-carve-titan-s-icy-surface-1819439257

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