Saturn’s largest moon tagged posts

The atmospheric haze of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon (pictured here along Saturn’s midsection), is captured in this natural-color image (box at left). A new study, which involved experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, has provided new clues about the chemical steps that may have produced this haze.
Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Space Science Institute, Caltech

A team of scientists homes in on a ‘missing link’ in Titan’s one-of-a-kind chemistry. Experiments have helped scientists to zero in on a low-temperature chemical mechanism that may help to explain the complex molecular compounds that make up the nitrogen-rich haze layer surrounding Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is unique among all moons in our solar system for its dense and nitroge...

The Dragonfly dual-quadcopter could make multiple flights to explore diverse locations as it characterizes the habitability of Titan’s environment.
Credit: APL/Mike Carroll

Dragonfly, a New Frontiers-class mission concept that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory has proposed to NASA, would use an instrumented, radioisotope-powered, dual-quadcopter to explore potential habitable sites where life could be developed on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. The moon is one of a number of “ocean worlds” in our solar system that hold the ingredients for life, and is known to be covered with rich organic material that is undergoing chemical processes that might be similar to those on early Earth, before life developed.

Titan has diverse, carbon-rich chemistry on a surface dominated by water ice...

Left to right: River networks on Mars, Earth, and Titan. Researchers report that Titan, like Mars but unlike Earth, has not undergone any active plate tectonics in its recent past. Credit: Benjamin Black/NASA/Visible Earth/JPL/Cassini RADAR team. Adapted from images from NASA Viking, NASA/Visible Earth, and NASA/JPL/Cassini RADAR team

Rivers on 3 worlds tell different tales. The environment on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, may seem surprisingly familiar: Clouds condense and rain down on the surface, feeding rivers that flow into oceans and lakes. Outside of Earth, Titan is the only other planetary body in the solar system with actively flowing rivers, though they’re fed by liquid methane instead of water. Long ago, Mars also hosted rivers, which scoured valleys across its now-arid surface...

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has features that resemble Earth’s geology, with deep, steep-sided canyons. Credit: Cassini/NASA/JPL

Although Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is surrounded by a thick, hazy atmosphere, Cornell astronomers have revealed that the moon’s terrain features deep, steep-sided canyons filled with liquid hydrocarbons. While NASA’s Cassini mission previously had imaged the channels flowing into the large northern sea Ligeia Mare, the new observations used the Cassini radar’s altimetry mode to measure their topography. The surprising results showed canyons hundreds of feet deep featuring specular reflections from the channel floors, the first direct evidence that they are currently filled with liquid.

“Earth is warm and rocky, with rivers of water, while Titan is cold and ...