It was a dark and stormy night on Titan. It often is. Smoggy haze all but obscures the sun and Saturn. In the distance, the rain falls in torrents.
Image: Ron Miller
In Brief
- Before the Cassini/Huygens mission, Titan was a cipher—the largest expanse of unglimpsed terrain left in the solar system, larger than the planet Mercury.
- Having penetrated the haze with infrared images, radar and a descent probe, the mission has discovered a dynamic landscape of rivers, lakes, dunes, mountains and possibly volcanoes. It is a frigid version of Earth, where methane substitutes for water, water substitutes for rock, and weather cycles last centuries.
- Studying Titan is already elucidating the geologic processes of our own planet, such as dune formation and climate change.
If we had not known the images were coming back from Titan, we might have guessed they were new pictures of Mars or Earth. Some people in the control room saw the California coast, some saw the French Riviera, and one person even said that Saturn’s biggest moon looked like his backyard in Tucson. For three weeks, the Huygens probe had coasted, dormant, after detaching from the Cassini spacecraft and being sent on its way to Titan. Those of us watching anxiously felt a deep personal connection with the probe. Not only had we worked on the mission for a large part of our careers, but we had developed its systems and instrumentation by putting our minds in its place, to think through how it would function on an alien and largely unknown world. We imagined Titan might be like the comparably large moons of the outer solar system, such as Jupiter’s cratered Callisto or grooved Ganymede.
And so on the morning of January 14, 2005, at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, the pictures caused jubilation and puzzlement in equal measure. None of us expected the landscape to look so Earth-like. As Huygens parachuted down, its aerial pictures showed branching river channels cut by rain-fed streams. It landed on the damp, pebble-covered site of a recent flash flood. What was alien about Titan was its eerie familiarity.
This article was originally published with the title The Moon That Would Be a Planet.
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7 Comments
Add CommentArticles that talk about amazing, otherworldy photos and don't show you them, make you leave the article to find the photos...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhich are here... some of them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://space.about.com/library/graphics/titan1.jpg
I'm glad for the report on Titan's atmosphere and surface in Sci. Am. March 2010, p. 36, by Lorenz and Sotin. During the 1990's, physicist John Geake of the Univ. of Manchester Inst, for Sci. & Tech., shared his design of a refractometer, which was intended for measuring refractive index for lakes/oceans and slated -- he said -- for the Huyghens probe mission. Geake deceased before the Cassini-Huyghens flight, and I have watched in vain for evidence that the Geake Refractometer actually went on the mission. Does any reader have evidence from that device during the landing on Titan?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid A. Cornell, Prof. Emeritus of Physics
David....the below link references the (Ref ractometer) (REF) but does not give any credits...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=31193&fbodylongid=740
Under the heading the Planet Gown Wild, I do not understand the term "one meter per year" A meter is a unit of length. Please explain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy penetrometer was part of the Surface Science Package which also included John's refractometer, which was a really elegant design. It did indeed fly,but of course since we didnt land in a liquid, it had no significant findings. The telemetry did show that it sensed a bit of Titan scattered light during descent, so it was functioning correctly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisre Meter per year - you talk of an inch of rainfall, right? Why not a meter. Think of it as a cubic meter per square meter.
Why does every damn article have to have "climate change" in the first few paragraphs? It's why I stopped reading this rag years ago.
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