ABOUT FACTS NET Astronomy

Did you think that we would have to travel outside our solar system to explore mysterious places? If you did, I hate to be the one to tell you, but you were wrong. I am not talking about traveling to Mars, which might prove quite interesting and on which we have placed robots already, but I am talking about a place that we would find totally alien to what we are used to. That place is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. We have nine planets in our solar system and many of them have moons. Some of them have a lot of moons and are like solar systems of their own. What I mean by this is that they have a lot of bodies orbiting them as the sun as planets orbiting it.

Globe of Titan - This is a composite of nine images
Photo Source: NASA

Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and it is also larger than Pluto. In recent years some astronomers have decided that Pluto is not a planet. Titan is not conducive to human life. The temperature is believed to be about -289 degrees F on the surface. Buuuur! Better wear your long johns if you are thinking of going there. At this temperature no one is expecting to find liquid water on the moon. What some scientists are expecting to find are lakes of dissolved methane. Titan was discovered in 1665 by Christiaan Huygens the famous astronomer. The mean diameter is 5150 km. Mass is 1,345X10^23kg. The surface area of the moon is 83X10^6Xkm^2. Mean density is 1.88g/cm^3. For comparison the average density of the Earth is 5515kg/m^3.The gravity is 1.35M/s^2 or 14 gee. Axis tilt is 0 and the rotation period is synchronous. The moon has an Albedo of 0.21. It is believed that the atmosphere is 95 percent Nitrogen and 5 percent Methane. Pressure is 160 kPa. Now that I have bored you to death with these statistics much of which are not understandable by lay people, including myself, lets get to the interesting bits.

On January 14, 2005, the Huygens probe descended through the atmosphere of Titan and took this startling photo. It shows what looks like a shoreline and hills.

Huygens' on its way down for a landing shows an incredible view.
Photo Source: NASA COMPOSITE

I don't want to cast a Science Fiction light over this whole thing, but when you look at the enlarged view, doesn't it look like there are some sort of structures there? Look at the long ridge along the left side of the photo going from south to north. Another is on the right side of the photo going from east to west. This is indeed a very strange photo, it almost looks like an aerial view of a city on Earth.

On June 28, 2005 a photo was taken of what seems to be a lake. It is said to be about the size of Lake Ontario which is 145 miles by 45 miles wide.

The lake is the dark feature and it is located at the south pole
Photo Source: NASA

Enlargement of lake area

As I stated before, no one believes that the lake is a lake of liquid water, but they do think it is liquid hydrocarbons. But there is another explanation, it is that this was once a lake and has dried up leaving behind dark deposits.

John Herschel, the son of William Herschel who discovered Mimas and Enceladus two other moons of Saturn, is credited with naming Titan in 1847. Titan has a magnitude that varies between +7.9 and +8.7 making it visible from Earth to someone using a powerful set of binoculars. Titan is the only known moon with a full atmosphere. This doesn't mean you would be able to breath it as you can see by its composition above. But life seems to spring up in the worst places on Earth and maybe some form of lower life will exist there, but I don't think there is even one scientist that would agree with me on this point.

There are 39 more Cassini flybys planned and you can bet that this lake feature will get plenty of coverage. Scientists will be looking for reflections to show that liquid is there. A possible volcano has also been seen on the surface of the moon. Now if we can only find some ruins.