Video Mapping. Saturn's largest moon was once a titanic snowball - space - 18 June 2014. Saturn's hazy moon Titan may sometimes morph into a ball of ice. Titan is already a frigid moon made mostly of ice. But methane gas in its atmosphere causes just enough of a greenhouse effect to keep a scattering of lakes filled with liquid hydrocarbons. Scientists have puzzled over Titan's atmospheric methane because sunlight causes the molecule to react readily with other chemicals in the air, producing the moon's dense smog. Calculations suggest that the amount of methane now found in Titan's atmosphere should have been used up within tens of millions of years – a blip in the moon's roughly 4-billion-year lifetime.
Clear the air Adding to the mystery, the methane reactions create hydrocarbon compounds that rain over the surface. Michael Wong at the California Institute of Technology says snowballs may be the missing piece of the puzzle. A similar event could have taken place on Titan, says Wong. Pluto proxy But how would this explain the moon's missing ocean?
More From New Scientist. River Networks On Titan Point To Puzzling Geologic History Eurasia Review. By Eurasia Review For many years, Titan’s thick, methane- and nitrogen-rich atmosphere kept astronomers from seeing what lies beneath. Saturn’s largest moon appeared through telescopes as a hazy orange orb, in contrast to other heavily cratered moons in the solar system. In 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft — a probe that flies by Titan as it orbits Saturn — penetrated Titan’s haze, providing scientists with their first detailed images of the surface. Radar images revealed an icy terrain carved out over millions of years by rivers of liquid methane, similar to how rivers of water have etched into Earth’s rocky continents. While images of Titan have revealed its present landscape, very little is known about its geologic past.
Now researchers at MIT and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have analyzed images of Titan’s river networks and determined that in some regions, rivers have created surprisingly little erosion. What accounts for a low crater count? Titan gets a dune 'makeover' (Phys.org)—Titan's siblings must be jealous. While most of Saturn's moons display their ancient faces pockmarked by thousands of craters, Titan - Saturn's largest moon - may look much younger than it really is because its craters are getting erased.
Dunes of exotic, hydrocarbon sand are slowly but steadily filling in its craters, according to new research using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Most of the Saturnian satellites - Titan's siblings - have thousands and thousands of craters on their surface. So far on Titan, of the 50 percent of the surface that we've seen in high resolution, we've only found about 60 craters," said Catherine Neish, a Cassini radar team associate based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "It's possible that there are many more craters on Titan, but they are not visible from space because they are so eroded. "This research is the first quantitative estimate of how much the weather on Titan has modified its surface," adds Neish.
Image of the Day --NASA Finds Vast River System on Saturn's Moon Titan. Titan has been considered a “unique world in the solar system” since 1908 when, the Spanish astronomer, José Comas y Solá, discovered that it had an atmosphere, something non-existent on other moons. It seems perfectly appropriate that one of the prime candidates for life in our solar system, Saturn's largest moon, should have surface lakes, lightning, shorelines, relatively thick nitrogen atmosphere, seasons, and now, a vast river system. "Though there are some short, local meanders, the relative straightness of the river valley suggests it follows the trace of at least one fault, similar to other large rivers running into the southern margin of this same Titan sea," said Jani Radebaugh, a Cassini radar team associate at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
"Such faults - fractures in Titan's bedrock -- may not imply plate tectonics, like on Earth, but still lead to the opening of basins and perhaps to the formation of the giant seas themselves. " mage credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI. Titan Shines in Latest Cassini Shots. Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Color-composite raw image of Titan’s southern hemisphere. Note the growing south polar vortex. (NASA/JPL/SSI/Jason Major) Last Thursday, November 29, Cassini sailed past Titan for yet another close encounter, coming within 1,014 kilometers (603 miles) of the cloud-covered moon in order to investigate its thick, complex atmosphere.
Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) and Imaging Science Subsystems (ISS) instruments were all busy acquiring data on Titan’s atmosphere and surface… here are a couple of color-composites made from raw images captured in visible light channels as well as some of the more interesting monochrome raw images. Enjoy! The structure of Titan’s upper-level hazes, which extend ten times the height of Earth’s atmosphere. Cassini’s continuum filter (CB3) allows it to image Titan’s surface. Read more about the T-88 flyby here. Sights and Sounds of Titan.
Sights and Sounds of Titan The European Space Agency's Huygens probe has landed on Saturn's giant moon Titan. Listen to this story via streaming audio, a downloadable file, or get help. January 16, 2005: Congratulations, ESA! The European Space Agency's (ESA's) Huygens probe, carried to Saturn by the Cassini spacecraft, parachuted to the surface of Saturn's giant moon Titan on Friday, Jan. 14th, revealing finally what lies beneath Titan's thick orange clouds. Right: From an altitude of 16 km, Huygens photographed these drainage channels leading to a shoreline. First images released by the ESA depict sinuous drainage channels leading to an apparent shoreline. It's all a bit familiar, yet at the same time utterly alien.
Above: Small "rocks," possibly made of water ice, at the Huygens landing site. Because Titan has a thick atmosphere, able to carry sound waves, the moon is a noisy place. Huygens was designed to float in case it landed in a river or lake--but it didn't. Saturns Moon Titan - A Place Like Home BBC Documentary | HD. Titan Gets Oxygen From Enceladus - Space News. Complex interactions between Saturn and its satellites have led scientists using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to a comprehensive model that could explain how oxygen may end up on the surface of Saturn’s icy moon Titan.
The presence of these oxygen atoms could potentially provide the basis for pre-biological chemistry. The interactions are captured in two papers, one led by John Cooper and another led by Edward Sittler, published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in late 2009. Cooper and Sittler are Cassini plasma spectrometer team scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Titan and Enceladus, another icy moon of Saturn, are chemically connected by the flow of material through the Saturn system,” Cooper said. In one paper, Cooper and colleagues provide an explanation for forces that could generate the Enceladus geysers that spew water vapor into space.
The plumes that emanate from Enceladus’ south polar region consist of water, ammonia and other compounds. Astrophile: Icy Titan spawns tropical cyclones - space - 22 February 2013. Astrophile is our weekly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse Object: Mini-hurricanes of methane rainLocation: North Pole of Saturn's moon Titan With a maximum surface temperature of -180 °C, Saturn's icy moon Titan is no tropical paradise, at least by earthly standards.
But it may still have tropical cyclones, and at what sounds like the unlikeliest of places – near its north pole. These mini-hurricanes have never been observed anywhere but Earth. If they exist on Titan, that would add to a growing list of features that the distant moon shares with our planet, from lakes, hills, caves and sand dunes to fog, mist, smoggy haze and rain clouds. Though cyclones - a large family of storms in which winds spiral inward to a low-pressure zone, such as the eye of a hurricane or tornado – have been glimpsed on Mars and Saturn, a tropical cyclone is a special case that is driven by the heat of evaporation from a warm sea.
Methane seas.