Titan Processed Montage

This montage of Cassini Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of the surface of Titan shows four examples of how a newly developed technique for handling noise results in clearer, easier to interpret views. The top row of images was produced in the manner used since the mission arrived in the Saturn system a decade ago; the row at bottom was produced using the new technique. The three leftmost image pairs show bays and spits of land in Ligea Mare, one of Titan’s large hydrocarbon seas. The rightmost pair shows a valley network along Jingpo Lacus, one of Titan’s larger northern lakes. North is toward the left in these images. Each thumbnail represents an area 70 miles (112 kilometers) wide. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries.

Discovered on March 25, 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is one of only a handful of Solar System bodies– as well as the only planetary moon– known to have fields of windswept dunes on its surface (the others are Earth, Venus, and Mars). Heavily veiled by an obscuring, dense blanket of orange smog, this eerie, mysterious moon-world is the second-largest moon in our entire Solar System, after Ganymede of Jupiter. In December 2014, a new study was released by scientists using experimental results derived from the high-pressure wind tunnel at Arizona State University’s Planetary Aeolian Laboratory in Tempe, Arizona. The new study suggests that earlier estimates of how fast winds need to blow to move sand-size particles around on this strange, bewitching, and distant moon are about 40 percent too low.

A team of planetary scientists led by Dr. Devon Burr of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville reported the findings December 9, 2014 in a paper published in the journal Nature. Dr. James K. Smith, engineer and manager of Arizona State University’s (ASU) Planetary Aeolian Laboratory, is one of the paper’s co-authors.

Saturn and its moon Titan orbit about ten times farther from our Star than the Earth. Planetary scientists obtained their first batch of detailed information about Titan when the Cassini/Huygens orbiter and lander arrived there in 2004. The Huygens lander successfully managed to obtain revealing images when it reached the weird surface of Titan, as well as when it was still falling slowly down to the surface through the moon’s thick, orange, foggy atmosphere– which has 1.4 times greater pressure than Earth’s. These pictures, along with additional studies using instruments on the Cassini orbiter, at long last unveiled, to the prying eyes of curious planetary scientists, that Titan’s geological features include river channels and lakes of methane, propane, and ethane. Titan also has mountains, craters, and sand dunes.

Dunes begin to take shape when the wind sweeps up loose particles from the ground and then causes them to do a jitter-bug, or saltate, downwind. Geologists have discovered threshold speeds for sand and dust under many different conditions on our own planet, as well as on Venus and Mars. For Titan, with its weird conditions, this behavior has long been unknown.

Bewitching, Bewildering, Bizarre Orange Moon

The surface temperature on Titan is a truly frigid minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit, and even its “sand” is probably not like the sand on Earth, Venus, or Mars. In addition, Titan’s gravity is low– it is only about one-seventh that of our own Earth.

Titan is a strange and tormented moon-world, composed mostly of water ice and rocky material. Its alien surface is slashed by weird seas and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons, and it is pelted mercilessly by heavy showers of large drops of hydrocarbon rain. It is also heavily shrouded by a relentless, dense rust-colored hydrocarbon smog, and displays a marvelous, major continent that scientists have named Xanadu after the “Xanadu” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. Titan’s Xanadu sparkles as if lit by the brilliant cold fires of trillions of glittering crystals!

Titan is almost as big as the planet Mars! However, its heavily smog-shrouded surface has historically been extraordinarily difficult to observe. This is because the dense, obscuring orange veil, composed of complex hydrocarbons, is extremely hard to penetrate. Titan’s alien atmosphere is very dense, composed of numerous thick layers of mist that together knit an intricate, complicated, and almost impenetrable shroud, hiding its surface from the curious eyes of observers.

Because Titan is located in the outer regions of our Solar System, circling the ringed gas-giant planet, Saturn– the sixth planet from our Star, the Sun– it is extremely cold, and its chemical atmosphere is frozen. Titan’s atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen– just like our Earth’s– but it also harbors significantly larger quantities of “smoggy” hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft made a heroic but, nevertheless, unsuccessful attempt back in 1980 to obtain close-up images of Titan’s secret surface. Unfortunately, it was not able to penetrate the dense orange veil, and the resulting pictures merely revealed some minor color and brightness variations in Titan’s weird atmosphere. In 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) succeeded in obtaining some revealing and valuable pictures of Titan’s mysterious surface– revealing the existence of the sparkling continent Xanadu for the first time!

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a collaborative NASA/European Space Agency/Italian Space Agency robotic spacecraft that is currently observing the Saturn system. The spacecraft was originally constructed to carry two main components: the European Space Agency-designed Huygens Probe, named in honor of Christiaan Huygens, and the NASA-designed Cassini Orbiter that was named for the Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Dominico Cassini (1625-1712) who discovered four of Saturn’s moons. After an incredible journey through interplanetary space, from our planet to the Saturn system, Cassini-Huygens at last arrived at the realm of the ringed planet on July 1, 2004. On December 25, 2004, the Huygens Probe was deliberately separated from the Cassini Orbiter, and it slowly descended down to the long-shrouded and secretive surface of the strange moon-world– sending back to scientists on Earth precious information about this mystery moon. Titan, at last, was revealing its long-hidden secrets. This mission will continue until 2017.

Titan possesses a geologically youthful surface that is quite smooth; pockmarked by very few impact craters. The climate of this moon-world– including wind and rain– carves out surface features that are similar to those on Earth– such as rivers, lakes, dunes, seas (likely of liquid methane and ethane), and deltas. Titan bears an eerie resemblance to Earth, and is thought to be similar to the way Earth once was long ago before the emergence of life (prebiotic).

Titan orbits its planet once every 15 days and 22 hours. Like Earth’s Moon, and many of the other moons of the four giant planets of the outer Solar System– Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune– its rotation period is identical to its orbital period. Titan is tidally locked in synchronous rotation with Saturn, and always shows one face to its planet.

Discovered on March 25, 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is one of only a handful of Solar System bodies– as well as the only planetary moon– known to have fields of windswept dunes on its surface (the others are Earth, Venus, and Mars). Saturn and its moon Titan orbit about ten times farther from our Star than the Earth. The Huygens lander successfully managed to obtain revealing images when it reached the weird surface of Titan, as well as when it was still falling slowly down to the surface through the moon’s thick, orange, foggy atmosphere– which has 1.4 times greater pressure than Earth’s. The surface temperature on Titan is a truly frigid minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit, and even its “sand” is probably not like the sand on Earth, Venus, or Mars. Titan’s alien atmosphere is very dense, composed of numerous thick layers of mist that together knit an intricate, complicated, and almost impenetrable shroud, hiding its surface from the curious eyes of observers.