Sunlight glints off of Titan’s northern seas this near-infrared, colour mosaic from Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft. Credit: Nasa/JPL/Univ Arizona/Univ Idaho.

A team of researchers at Washington State University in the US has re-created an ocean of  Titan, as part of a project to help Nasa to test how a submarine might work on Saturn’s largest moon.

Titan’s ocean is made of methane and ethane, and its temperature is as low as -300ºF.

WSU former mechanical engineering graduate Ian Richardson recreated the atmosphere of Titan and tested how a small heated machine might function under the moon’s tricky oceans.

Earth’s water-based oceans are nearly homogeneous but the density properties of Titan’s oceans can change dramatically due to concentration of ethane and methane.

“It’s a crazy experiment, and I never thought I would have had this opportunity. It’s been a very fun and challenging experimental design problem.”

Nasa plans to send a real submarine into Titan’s seas over the next two decades.

Nasa has already commenced designingthe submarine that will be able to operate autonomously and examine Titan’s atmospheric and ocean conditions, in addition to moving around seabeds.

Richardson said: “My research just took a right turn, and I went with it.

“It’s a crazy experiment, and I never thought I would have had this opportunity. It’s been a very fun and challenging experimental design problem.”

To create the ocean, Richardson and his team built a test chamber to accommodate the liquid mixture at very cold temperatures to simulate the seas of Titan.

A 2in cylinder-shaped cartridge heater was included to approximate the heat that a submarine would create.

The researchers have also studied the behaviours of nitrogen bubbles that would be produced by the heat-producing submarine in the very cold Titan liquid.

According to the researchers, it was a challenging job for them to understand the nitrogen bubbles produced by the heat-producing submarine in the very cold liquid of Titan as too many bubbles would make it hard to manoeuvre the ship; and see, collect data and manage ballast systems.

They further noted that in order to take video in the difficult conditions of the test chamber, they had to develop a solution using a borescope and video camera that could withstand the low temperatures and high pressures to visualise the ongoing activities.