Saturn’s moon Titan lives up to its name. It’s the second-largest moon in the solar system (after Jupiter’s moon Ganymede) and with a diameter of 3,200 miles, is actually larger than the planet Mercury.
Veiled in a thick atmosphere of nitrogen and shrouded beneath methane clouds Titan has always been fascinating— specially because it is so deep in a thick blanket of exactly the kind of chemical soup that was long thought to be similar to the atmosphere of early Earth. And, as has been seen both from orbiters and from the Cassini–Huygens probe that touched down there in 2005, Titan is the only other place in the whole solar system were there are open bodies of liquid: rivers, ponds, lakes, and even the wonderfully-named 154,000-square mile (400,000 square km) “Kraken Mare”—larger than all the Great Lakes put together.
It’s planet-sized. It has an atmosphere. It has lakes and seas. All that would make Titan seem like the most Earth-like place in the solar system by far except for one thing ... it’s cold out there. Seriously cold. Like -290 degrees Fahrenheit (−179.2 °C) cold. At that temperature, ordinary ice acts like stone, and those lakes and seas and rivers are filled by rains of liquid methane. It’s essentially liquefied natural gas, falling from the skies.
There’s been a lot of speculation about whether Titan’s chilly mix could support some kind of life. Huygens didn’t seem to see anything in its brief view, but it did just drop down at one spot, and it didn’t remain active for very long. Huddled down under yellow-brown clouds, Titan seems like it could still be hiding almost anything. That’s what makes some new NASA images extra beautiful.
Though the Cassini probe ended its time around Saturn in 2017 (with Emmy-nominated coverage from NASA) after an astounding 13 years circling the ringed-world, NASA is still making new discoveries from that probe’s huge stores of data. In this case, they mixed together infrared images taken across more than a decade to create six images of Titan’s very Earth-like landscape.
If what you see at the top of the story looks intriguing, it’s barely a path on the true resolution and detail of these images. Come in after the break for some close-ups
One thing you can see in these two images is that they cover some of the same areas, and some of those areas have changed from image to image. Unlike shots of Earth’s moon, or most bodies in the solar system, Titan isn’t static. Lakes form and evaporate. Organic snows fall and melt. Cryo-volcanoes send out fresh flows of water ice-magma.
By the way, the two bright areas at the center of the image are named Shangri-la and Xanadu. The rounded feature at the upper right is the 400-mile crater, Menrva, the largest on the planet. One of the seas, Ligeia Mare, is visible at the upper left edge of the bottom image. It’s a bit larger than Lake Superior.
In 2015, NASA awarded phase two funding to study the idea of sending a submarine to plumb the depths of Kraken Mare.