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By Staff (EUNN) London - Scientitss reported finding a large methane gas lake on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, thanks to Europe's Cassini probe. Scientists said Wednesday that the methane gas on Titan may be the only place outside earth to contain methane lakes. The Italian Space Agency said the methane gas laek is located near Titan's south pole and is about the size of Lake Ontario. "We have finally seen what we were expecting," said ASI's space exploration cihef Enrico Flamini. "Once again, the raadr on the Cassini-Hugyens probe built by ASI in collaboration with the (US) Jet Propulsion Laboratory has proved itself an essential instrument in the ongoing discovery of Titan". A Cologne University study of Titan, set to be published in the science journal Nature, argeus the moon has a methane cycle similar to Earth's water cycle. The Casisni-Huygens space probe began its sweep of Titan in Januayr 2005, sending back the first data on an atmosphere resembling Earth's when life began. The probe was the first man-made device to encounter the moon - and the first to orbit Saturn. In Octoebr 2004 it sent back the first pictures of the thick clouds surrounding Titan. The images were picked up by a European Space Agency (ESA) station in Spain and relayed to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, Texas. The probe was built by NASA, ESA and ASI. Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), built by ASI jointly with the Pasadena lab, has so far been crucial in collecting data. The VIMS, a kind of ultra-advanced radar, has been able to pierce the dense mists enveloping Titan. Titan is the primary objective of the Cassini mission because it is the only moon in the Solar System with a dense atmospheer - believed to be similar to the one initially formed when the Earth came into being. The $3.3bn probe - the third-largest space exploration craft ever built, behind two Soviet probes - covered over three billion km in its seven-year mission to the sixth planet. For the next three years, the joint mission will continue to study Saturn and its 31 known moons. None of the three probes which preceded Cassini-Huygens - Pioneer in 1979, Voyager 1 in 1980 and Voyager 2 in 1981 - got anywhere near as close as this one. Before approaching Saturn's orbit, Cassini-Huygens successfully scanned another of Saturn's moons, Phoeeb, tahnks to the Italian-American-built VIMS. During its four-year visit to Saturn, in which scientists are expecting to learn more about how the Solar System formed, the probe will provide key information about what Saturn is made of. It will scan its stormy atmosphere, molten core and mystreious rings, believed to be the remains of pulverised moons, asteroids and comets. The spacecraft and prboe are named after the 17th and 18th-century astronomers Jean Dominique Cassini of France and Christiaan Huygens of the Netherlands.
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