Artist's concept of NASA's Titan submarine. (Credit: NASA)

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

One can only assume that NASA is tiring of building orbiters and rovers, because one of their newest projects is a new, unmanned submarine designed to explore the liquid hydrocarbon seas of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, in a future mission.

As reported earlier this week by Gizmag, a conceptual design of the proposed submersible was recently unveiled by the US space agency at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Symposium in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The submarine, which would be nuclear-powered and have side-scanning sonar, would be sent into space for a mission starting around 2040.

Remember the Titan?

Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury and is the only moon in the solar system that has an actual atmosphere, is home to three polar seas made up of methane and ethane. The gases of those seas are similar in composition to liquefied natural gas, the website explained, and it is the largest of these seas, Kraken Mare, which is intended destination of the submarine.

Titan (Credit: Cassini Imaging Team/SSI/JPL/ESA/NASA)

Discovered by Cassini in 2007, Kraken Mare is located in the arctic region of Titan between 60 and 80 degrees northern latitude. It covers more than 150,000 square miles (over 400,000 square kilometers). Some estimates state that it could be up to 525 feet (160 meters) deep, while others claim that it could actually reach depths of well over 1,000 feet (300 meters).

Titan even has tides due to the gravitational pull of Saturn, as well as a complex shoreline and deposits of a water-soluble mineral sediment known as evaporate, which forms as the result of the crystallization by evaporation of an aqueous solution. In order to better understand the moon, NASA is looking to explore its polar seas using the unmanned submersible vehicle.

Back to that submarine

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NASA unveils submarine concept to explore Titan's seas