Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Ski Titan!

Cassini has imaged a 100-mile long mountain range on Saturn's largest moon, …

One of NASA's recent success stories, the Cassini probe currently in orbit around Saturn, made a recent flyby of the planet's largest moon, Titan. With a combination of radar mapping and infrared imaging, the probe was able to distinguish features as small as 400 meters and get a sense of their optical properties. The data has now been combined and crunched, and it reveals a few more twists to what Cassini and the ESA's Huygens probe had previously revealed about this body covered with dunes and hydrocarbon seas.

Newly identified features include the chain of mountains seen at right. They reside in the moon's southern hemisphere, run for about 150 km, and reach a height of about 1.5 km (that's about 100 and 1 miles, respectively). Highly reflective surfaces suggest they are coated in new material, perhaps a methane snow. The current consensus seems to be that they are likely the result of an up-welling of new material through a crack in Titan's surface, much like new areas of the earth's surface form at mid-ocean ridges. The mountains may account for one of the features of Titan that had previously been difficult to explain: the presence of persistent clouds in the southern hemisphere of the moon. If these mountains affect the weather in the same way their counterparts on earth do, then clouds would not be very surprising.

Further evidence that Titan is tectonically active comes from images of what might be a volcano of some sort. Scientists had already identified a raised, rounded feature that looked suspiciously like a volcano; the new infrared imaging reveals a fan-shaped feature nearby that could have formed from some sort of eruptive activity. Cassini made another flyby just yesterday, so we may get further perspective on some of these features in a few months.

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