Team: The Swimmers

Year: 2016-17

Grade: 5-6

City: Maracaibo

Teachers: Alexis Mavarez and Efrain Urdaneta


Target: Titan's Lakes

Team Members:

Juan Gotopo (team leader)         Liceo los Robles, Maracaibo
Angelo Salazar         Liceo Los Robles
Jose Alejandro Alvarez         Liceo Los Robles
Fernando Delgado         Liceo Los Robles
Diana,Garcia         Jose Antonio Anzoategui, Maracaibo
Diego,Lopez         Liceo Los Robles
Edmundo,Finol (team leader)         Liceo Los Robles
Maximiliano and Mateo Delgado         Liceo Los Robles

"In our opinion, to understand Titans lakes, we have to first understand its atmosphere,composed basically of 94% nitrogen, 6% methane. To begin explaining why we choose objective 2 we would like to mention that after reading an article dated 27 June 2006 written by Spanish scientists collaborating with ESA at Universidad del País in Bilbao, Drs Ricardo Hueso and Agustín Sánchez Labega, published in the magazine Nature in which they presented a work giving information on the formation of liquid methane storms on Titan.

After that article it became clear for us after Cassini used its radar,it detected on 21 July 2006 two dark "patches" similar to Earth lakes on its surface, giving strong evidence of hydrocarbons, located near the North Pole of Titan, and afterwards it discovered on 23 September 2006, another 67 more around latitudes 74º N and 65º West.

These great discoveries left us jaw dropped, amazed, such an awesome phenomena occurring in another celestial body different from Earth? With hydrocarbon lakes, methane rains and an atmosphere similar to Earth?

That's the basic and strong reason we chose to go for objective 2. An opportunity not to be lost, specially after having such rich information gathered by so many probes: Pioneer 11 in 1979 , Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1980 and 1981, all of them launched by NASA, and afterwards the Cassini/Huygens mission, by NASA, ESA and ASI in cooperation, using a radar to map surfaces, and not to forget the incredible adventure endured by the Huygens probe from ESA in landing at Titan, in a region called Adiri. After Dr. Martín Tomasko, from University of Arizona (the person in charge of Huygens' cameras) declared: "now we have the code and knowledge to know whats going on at Titan."

You Might Also Like