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Scientists revise view of Titan — and hold out hope for life

Cassini photo of Titan with Saturn in background
An image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows Titan in front of Saturn and its rings. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI)

A fresh analysis of tidal perturbations on Titan challenges a long-held hypothesis: that the cloud-shrouded Saturnian moon harbors an ocean of liquid water beneath its surface ice. But the scientists behind the analysis don’t rule out the possibility that smaller pockets of subsurface water could nevertheless provide a home for extraterrestrial life.

“The search for extraterrestrial environments is fundamentally a search for habitats where liquid water coexists with sustained sources of energy (chemical, sunlight, etc.) over geological time scales. Our new results do not preclude the existence of such environments within Titan, but rather, further support their plausibility,” University of Washington planetary scientist Baptiste Journaux, a co-author of the study published in Nature, told me in an email.

Journaux acknowledged that the results don’t match up with conventional wisdom. He said they represent a “true paradigm shift” in how scientists think Titan is put together.

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Investigators say Titan sub tragedy was ‘preventable’

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush
In a 2017 image, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush is framed by the carbon-fiber cylinder for the Titan sub's hull. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

In a report issued today, the U.S. Coast Guard panel investigating the loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its occupants in 2023 blamed the disaster on a series of safety lapses — and issued recommendations that were aimed at heading off future tragedies.

“This marine casualty and the loss of five lives was preventable,” Jason Neubauer, the chair of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, said in a news release.

The 335-page report said the Coast Guard would have referred the CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, Stockton Rush, to the Justice Department for criminal investigation if he had survived Titan’s catastrophic implosion on June 18, 2023. Rush, who piloted the sub, died instantly during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, along with four passengers: Titanic expert P.H. Nargeolet, British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood.

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RMS Titanic reveals wreck’s decay and makes a new find

View of Titanic's ruined bow
A picture taken by an underwater drone shows the Titanic shipwreck’s iconic bow with a section of its railing missing. (RMS Titanic Photo)

RMS Titanic, the company holding the salvage rights to the wreck of the Titanic, says its latest robotic survey of the shipwreck site revealed the deterioration of the Titanic’s iconic bow, as well as the location of a long-sought statuette.

The 20-day expedition, conducted in July and August, provided the first look at the 112-year-old wreck since last year’s OceanGate tragedy. That dive ended in the catastrophic loss of Everett, Wash.-based Oceangate’s Titan submersible and its five-person crew, including company CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush.

In a news release, RMS Titanic said the findings from this summer’s expedition “showcase a bittersweet mix of preservation and loss.”

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Investigator debunks fake news about OceanGate

Titan submersible
OceanGate’s Titan submersible was lost during a dive to the Titanic in June 2023. (OceanGate Photo)

The chairman of the Coast Guard investigation panel for last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible says his team has “found no evidence” that crew members knew about their peril.

In the wake of the tragedy, a purported transcript of communications during Titan’s final dive included increasingly desperate references to an alarm aboard the sub. But Jason Neubauer, the chairman of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, told The New York Times that the document “was made up.”

That conclusion is based on a review of the actual messages between Titan and its mothership as the sub descended toward the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic on June 18, 2023. Although that true transcript has not yet been released, Neubauer’s comments support the view that the five crew members died virtually instantaneously in the violent implosion of Titan’s carbon composite hull.

Neubauer told the Times that he hoped the truth would console relatives of the crew who may have worried that their loved ones suffered in their last moments.

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Coast Guard delivers more debris from Titan sub wreck

Coast Guard engineers examine Titan sub debris
Coast Guard engineers examine the aft titanium endcap from OceanGate's Titan submersible in October 2023. (NTSB Photo)

The U.S. Coast Guard says it has recovered and transferred the remaining evidence and debris from OceanGate’s Titan submersible to a U.S. port for cataloging and analysis — more than three months after the deep-sea implosion that killed the sub’s five crew members in the North Atlantic.

In an update issued today, the Coast Guard said the transfer was made on Oct. 4. “Additional presumed human remains were carefully recovered from within Titan’s debris and transported for analysis by U.S. medical professionals,” it said.

OceanGate was a startup headquartered in Everett, Wash. — and the company’s founder and CEO, Stockton Rush, was among the casualties. In August, OceanGate said a new CEO with tech industry experience, Gordon Gardiner, would lead the company through the investigation and the closure of operations.

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A flying boat for Titan? It could happen…

Illustration: TitanAir probe flying over Titan's lakes
Artwork shows a probe flying through the skies of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. (Image via Quinn Morley)

NASA says it’ll distribute up to $2.45 million to 14 teams in support of experimental projects that would be right at home in the pages of a science-fiction novel — including a plan to send a flying boat to study the smoggy atmosphere and hydrocarbon-rich lakes of Titan.

The unconventional Titan probe was proposed by a former Boeing mechanic in Gig Harbor, Wash., who says his space venture — Planet Enterprises — is “pretty much a one-man band,” at least for now.

Two other researchers based in the Seattle area also won Phase 1 grants in the latest round of awards by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC. Each nine-month Phase 1 study grant is worth $175,000, and successful projects could go on to win additional funding during follow-up phases.

The NIAC program is designed to support out-of-this-world ideas that could eventually become reality. “These initial Phase 1 NIAC studies help NASA determine whether these futuristic ideas could set the stage for future space exploration capabilities and enable amazing new missions,” Michael LaPointe, program executive for NIAC at NASA Headquarters, explained in a news release.

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NASA decides to send a nuclear drone to Titan

Dragonfly probe
An artist’s conception shows the Dragonfly probe on the dunes of Titan. (NASA / JHUAPL Illustration)

Update for Nov. 28, 2023: NASA has postponed formal confirmation of the Dragonfly mission to Titan mission until mid-2024, and the launch readiness date is now estimated to be in 2028 rather than 2026.

Previously: NASA has chosen to commit up to $850 million to creating an interplanetary probe unlike any seen before: a rotor-equipped spacecraft that will fly through the smoggy atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon.

The Dragonfly mission will be managed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory on NASA’s behalf, with its launch scheduled for 2026 on a rocket to be named later, and its landing due amid the dunes of Titan in 2034.

This won’t be the first landing on Titan: That happened back in 2005, when the Cassini spacecraft dropped off the Huygens lander to send back the first pictures from the moon’s cloud-obscured surface. Observations from Cassini and Huygens confirmed that chilly Titan held rivers and lakes of liquid methane and ethane, and that methane fell like rain on the icy terrain.

“Titan is the only other place in the solar system known to have an Earthlike cycle of liquids flowing across its surface,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said in a tweet. “Dragonfly will explore the processes that shape this extraordinary environment filled with organic compounds – the building blocks to life as we know it.”

Today’s announcement was the climax of a years-long process to choose the next mission for NASA’s New Horizons portfolio, which supports projects costing no more than $850 million. Past selections include the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the Juno mission to Jupiter. and the OSIRIS-REx mission to bring back a sample from asteroid Bennu.

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OceanGate sets titanic record with 4-person dive

OceanGate Titan crew
The crew of OceanGate’s Titan submersible gets set for a dive of Titanic proportions. From left are Karl Stanley, Petros Mathioudakis, pilot Stockton Rush and Joel Perry. (OceanGate Photo)

OceanGate set a deep-diving record last week when a crew of four rode inside the Everett, Wash.-based company’s Titan submersible to the Titanic-level depth of 3,760 meters (12,336 feet) in the Bahamas.

The April 17 voyage, which served as a test run for this summer’s trips to the wreck of the Titanic, marked the first time a non-military submersible carried more than three people to that depth, OceanGate said.

“This dive was another important step toward deep-sea exploration to more people and places,” OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who served as Titan’s chief pilot for the trip, said today in a news release. “We are developing technologies and designing submersibles and infrastructure that is making underwater exploration more accessible than ever before.”

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OceanGate gears up for Titanic dive rehearsals

OceanGate Titan sub
OceanGate’s Titan submersible is designed to withstand pressures at Titanic depths. (OceanGate Photo)

Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate is heading back down to the Bahamas next week to practice deep-sea dives of Titanic proportions with its next-generation Titan submersible — and this time, team members are bringing along paying customers.

About 10 mission specialists wll accompany OceanGate’s team for rehearsals that will involve sending Titan down to depths of nearly 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). That’s as far down as the famous wreck of the Titanic lies in the North Atlantic.

This month’s rehearsal follows up on a series of deep dives done by OceanGate last year. The plan doesn’t call for mission specialists to climb into the submersible this time around, OceanGate marketing manager Dana Hall told GeekWire. Instead, they’ll be on the R/V Angari, the expedition’s tracking and communications ship.

The goal is to familiarize at least some of OceanGate’s customers with the duties they’ll be performing when Titan and its support vessels head up to Newfoundland for 10-day voyages to the Titanic site that are due to start in June.

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OceanGate reschedules Titanic sub trips for 2019

Titan sub
OceanGate’s Titan submersible is undergoing testing in the Bahamas. (OceanGate Photo via Twitter)

OceanGate is putting its underwater trips to the Titanic shipwreck on hold for a year, due to difficulties encountered during deep-water testing of its submersible in the Bahamas.

The Titan sub’s first trips to the world’s most famous shipwreck had been set to start next month in the North Atlantic. This week, team leaders at the Everett, Wash.-based venture decided they couldn’t make the schedule.

“While we are disappointed by the need to reschedule the expedition, we are not willing to shortcut the testing process due to a condensed timeline,” OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush said today in a news release. “We are 100 percent committed to safety, and want to fully test the sub and validate all operational and emergency procedures before launching any expedition.”

Making the decision now gives advance notice for OceanGate’s clients, crew members, partners and affiliates to make other plans for the summer, Rush said.

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