The Voyager spacecrafts were not able to penetrate the thick layers of clouds as it flew by in 1980, but they did reveal that Titan is one of the more interesting places in the solar system with more geologic features. Expecting an unusual world, the Cassini mission is able to penetrate the thick layers of clouds and is able to reveal what kind of landscape lies below the layers of clouds. What mysteries are held beneath these orange curtains is slowly being revealed.
The Cassini mission had first revealed that Titan’s surface is relatively smooth. The few bumps and dark spots that can be seen seem to be the impact of craters or perhaps by raining hydrocarbons or volcanoes. Titan is the only moon in our solar system to have a dense atmosphere. In recent times, this atmosphere reserved understanding of Titan’s surface, but the moon that is currently undergoing intense study by the Cassini-Huygens mission, and the new information gathered add to scientists understanding of the moon. The infrared-sensitive camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has photographed the tallest mountains ever seen on Saturn’s moon, Titan.
The mountain chain is nearly a mile high (1.5 kilometers), 93 miles long (150 kilometers) and 19 miles wide (30 kilometers). The mountains are topped by bright, white material which may be methane or other organic (carbon-containing) “snow.” These mountains are probably as hard as rock, made of icy materials, and are coated with different layers of organics.
The new images shows that the layers are just like the various coats of organic ‘paint’ on top of each other on these mountain tops, more or less like a painter laying the background on a canvas. Some of this organic gunk falls out of the atmosphere as rain, dust or smog onto the valley floors and mountain tops, which are coated with dark spots that appear to be brushed, washed, scoured and moved around the surface. The new infrared images also clarify the composition of dunes that run across much of Titan. The dunes, built on water-ice bedrock, seem to consist of sand grains made of organics.
Masked in an atmosphere impenetrable to the visible light, Titan is a planet-size organic reactor where “building blocks” of life are being generated as they might have been created 4 billion years ago on Earth. Now when scientists are able to able to see through the orange-brown atmospheric haze and admire the unknown world below, it will be easy to understand in what form Titan has organics and how much.
Via: Physorg
