{"id":76265,"date":"2018-02-23T14:02:51","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T22:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/a-little-robotic-submarine-could-ply-alien-seas"},"modified":"2018-02-25T11:05:41","modified_gmt":"2018-02-25T19:05:41","slug":"a-little-robotic-submarine-could-ply-alien-seas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/a-little-robotic-submarine-could-ply-alien-seas","title":{"rendered":"A Little Robotic Submarine Could Ply Alien Seas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-little-robotic-submarine-could-ply-alien-seas.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>NASA is designing a robot submarine to explore the ultrachilly, hydrocarbon-filled seas on Saturn\u2019s moon Titan \u2014 the only body in the solar system, apart from Earth, with liquid on its surface. Researchers have been testing the probe with a bucket-sized mock alien ocean in a lab.<\/p>\n<p>The seas of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/15257-titan-saturn-largest-moon-facts-discovery-sdcmp.html\">Titan<\/a> are very different from their counterparts on Earth: instead of seawater, Titan\u2019s seas consist mainly of a frigid mixture of methane and ethane, at a temperature of around minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 184 degrees Celsius). That\u2019s what <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/17754-cassini-huygens.html\">NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft<\/a> and its Huygens probe, which landed on Titan in 2005, found.<\/p>\n<p>The plan is to send the autonomous submarine into the largest sea on Titan. called Kraken Mare, from the name of a Scandinavian sea-monster and the Latin word for \u201csea,\u201d the extraterrestrial sea covers 155,000 square miles (400,000 square kilometers) of the moon\u2019s surface. (The second-largest sea on Titan, about a quarter the size of Kraken, is Ligeia Mare, named after one of the monstrous sirens of Greek mythology.) [<a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/61850-titan-saturn-submarine-photos.html\">See Photos of Titan\u2019s Oceans<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/61851-robotic-submarine-alien-seas.html\">https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/61851-robotic-submarine-alien-seas.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA is designing a robot submarine to explore the ultrachilly, hydrocarbon-filled seas on Saturn\u2019s moon Titan \u2014 the only body in the solar system, apart from Earth, with liquid on its surface. Researchers have been testing the probe with a bucket-sized mock alien ocean in a lab. The seas of Titan are very different from [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76340,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76265\/revisions\/76340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}