Picture a gentle landscape of hilly sand dunes leading down to a tranquil lake, whose surface starts rippling in the afternoon wind, disturbing the reflection of the few white clouds drifting above. On the opposite shore, a sudden rainstorm wets the stones and pebbles. It feels as if a sunset is unfolding because the entire sky is pumpkin colored.

Welcome to the surface of Saturn’s giant moon Titan, the only known satellite with an appreciable atmosphere and all the changing weather that goes with it. The air here is about 11/2 times thicker than ours, and, like ours, mostly nitrogen. Combined with its low gravity — comparable to what the Apollo astronauts experienced while hopping around on the Moon — such soupy air would let people easily fly around by flapping their arms courtesy of cardboard wings.

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Saturn’s satellite sounds like a fun place — a sort of bizarre, amusement-park variation of our world. It even might harbor unique forms of life, perhaps on its surface, or maybe underground. But Titan is not so jolly-weird — it’s scary-perilous.

This titanic story began in 1655 when Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens (HOY-ghens) first realized that the odd “teacup handles” Galileo Galilei thought were affixed to Saturn a few decades earlier were really unattached rings encircling the planet. Huygens then went on to discover a moon orbiting the ringed world. In one of the greatest recorded moments of unimaginativeness, he named it Saturni Luna — Latin for Saturn’s moon. It took almost two centuries before John Herschel suggested something better: Titan. The world quickly agreed.