Methane Rain

For Saturn’s largest moon, springtime means showers of methane. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently saw a “large, dark puddle appear in the wake of a storm cloud” near the deserts of Titan’s equatorial area.

On Titan, where temperatures drop to minus-297 degrees Fahrenheit, polar lakes are filled with methane instead of water. Cloud systems moving from south to north during the changing seasons drop the methane.

We wrote about Cassini’s mission in our June 2006 issue. Click here to read all about it in our Wayback Machine.