Water on Mars and Liquid Lakes on Titan.

Two big pieces of news in space science this week (besides NASA’s birthday — which was awesome too).  Both of these stories are from NASA and may be interesting to anyone, like myself, who is a big supporter of space exploration.  First, NASA’s Phoenix Landed on Wednesday confirmed finding water on the red planetwhich gained an extension for the mission.  Is the discovery of organic molecules, or, rather optimistically, life next?  Doubtfully, but water is still a big find.  The other big find of the week is that there are liquid lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan.  This find was confirmed by the Cassini Space Probe which has been studying the moons of Saturn.  On earlier fly-bys of Titan, Cassini had shown dark lake appearing areas but it was not until this week that test results confirmed that these were actually made of the liquid hydrocarbonethane (which, being a hydrocarbon, is an organic chemical by the way).  Of course considering that ethane is usually a gas on Earth (it is similar to methane) that means these are some very cold lakes, not at all suitable for any Earth-like lifeforms to be swimming in.  Very cool stuff here, way to go NASA, 50 years old and still wowing us (now lets get some folks back to the moon and maybe to Mars too right?)