Titan Facts

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and the only moon in our solar system known to have a substantial atmosphere. Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids on its surface. It has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.

Introduction
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is an icy world whose surface is completely obscured by a golden hazy atmosphere. Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system. Only Jupiter's moon Ganymede is larger, by just 2 percent. Titan is bigger than Earth's moon, and larger than even the planet Mercury.

This mammoth moon is the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it’s the only world besides Earth that has standing bodies of liquid, including rivers, lakes and seas, on its surface. Like Earth, Titan’s atmosphere is primarily nitrogen, plus a small amount of methane. It is the sole other place in the solar system known to have an earthlike cycle of liquids raining from clouds, flowing across its surface, filling lakes and seas, and evaporating back into the sky (akin to Earth’s water cycle). Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean of water.

Namesake
Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan on March 25, 1655.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens
Huygens called his discovery "Luna Saturni," which is Latin for Saturn moon. The name Titan came from John Herschel, son of astronomer William Herschel. Titans are from Greek mythology.

>> there is more >>
https://science.nasa.gov/saturn/moons/titan/facts/

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It's Raining on Titan
Illustration Credit & Copyright: David A. Hardy (AstroArt)

Explanation:
It's been raining on Titan. In fact, it's likely been raining methane on Titan and that's not an April Fools' joke. The almost familiar scene depicted in this artist's vision of the surface of Saturn's largest moon looks across an eroding landscape into a stormy sky. That scenario is consistent with seasonal rain storms temporarily darkening Titan's surface along the moon's equatorial regions, as seen by instruments onboard the Cassini spacecraft. Of course on frigid Titan, with surface temperatures of about -290 degrees F (-180 degrees C), the cycle of evaporation, cloud formation, and rain involves liquid methane instead of water. Lightning could also be possible in Titan's thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050117.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110401.html

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Soaring over Titan
* Video Credit: Cassini Radar Mapper, JPL, USGS, ESA, NASA
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/cassini/spacecraft/cassini-orbiter/
(for this post a compressed version of the featured video has been used ..)

Explanation:
What would it look like to fly over Titan? Radar images from NASA's robotic Cassini satellite in orbit around Saturn have been digitally compiled to simulate such a flight. Cassini has swooped past Saturn's cloudiest moon several times since it arrived at the ringed planet in 2004. The virtual flight featured here shows numerous lakes colored black and mountainous terrain colored tan. Surface regions without detailed vertical information appear more flat, while sufficiently mapped regions have their heights digitally stretched. Among the basins visualized is Kraken Mare, Titan's largest lake which spans over 1,000 kilometers long. Titan's lakes are different from Earth's lakes in that they are composed of hydrocarbons with similarities to liquid natural gas. How Titan's lakes were created and why they survive continues to be a topic of research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap141124.html

#space #moon #titan #science #nature

Huygens Lands on Titan
* Image Credit: ESA / NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

Explanation:
Delivered by Saturn-bound Cassini, ESA's Huygens probe touched down on the ringed planet's largest moon Titan, ten years ago on January 14, 2005. These panels show fisheye images made during its slow descent by parachute through Titan's dense atmosphere. Taken by the probe's descent imager/spectral radiometer instrument they range in altitude from 6 kilometers (upper left) to 0.2 kilometers (lower right) above the moon's surprisingly Earth-like surface of dark channels, floodplains, and bright ridges. But at temperatures near -290 degrees F (-180 degrees C), the liquids flowing across Titan's surface are methane and ethane, hydrocarbons rather than water. After making the most distant landing for a spacecraft from Earth, Huygens transmitted data for more than an hour. The Huygens data and a decade of exploration by Cassini have shown Titan to be a tantalizing world hosting a complex chemistry of organic compounds, dynamic landforms, lakes, seas, and a possible subsurface ocean of liquid water.

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Dunes of Shangri-La on Titan
August 31, 2018

Scenes from a frigid alien landscape are coming to light in recent radar images of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

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Potentially Habitable Moons
* Image Credit: Research and compilation - René Heller (McMaster Univ.) et al.
https://arxiv.org/search/astro-ph?searchtype=author&query=Heller,+R
Panels - NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute - Copyright: Ted Stryk
https://planetimages.blogspot.com/

Explanation:
For astrobiologists, these may be the four most tantalizing moons in our Solar System. Shown at the same scale, their exploration by interplanetary spacecraft has launched the idea that moons, not just planets, could have environments supporting life. The Galileo mission to Jupiter discovered Europa's global subsurface ocean of liquid water and indications of Ganymede's interior seas. At Saturn, the Cassini probe detected erupting fountains of water ice from Enceladus indicating warmer subsurface water on even that small moon, while finding surface lakes of frigid but still liquid hydrocarbons beneath the dense atmosphere of large moon Titan. Now looking beyond the Solar System, new research suggests that sizable exomoons, could actually outnumber exoplanets in stellar habitable zones. That would make moons the most common type of habitable world in the Universe.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140919.html

Formation, Habitability, and Detection of Extrasolar Moons

The diversity and quantity of moons in the Solar System suggest a manifold population of natural satellites exist around extrasolar planets. Of peculiar interest from an astrobiological perspective, the number of sizable moons in the stellar habitable zones may outnumber planets in these circumstellar regions. With technological and theoretical methods now allowing for the detection of sub-Earth-sized extrasolar planets, the first detection of an extrasolar moon appears feasible. ..
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https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.6164

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Remember the Titan (Landing): Twenty years ago today, Jan. 14, 2005, the Huygens probe touched down on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

This new, narrated movie was created with data collected by Cassini's imaging cameras and the Huygens Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR). The first minute shows a zoom into images of Titan from Cassini's cameras, while the remainder of the movie depicts the view from Huygens during the last few hours of its historic descent and landing.

It was October 15, 1997, when NASA's Cassini orbiter embarked on an epic, seven-year voyage to the Saturnian system. Hitching a ride was ESA's Huygens probe, destined for Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The final chapter of the interplanetary trek for Huygens began on 25 December 2004 when it deployed from the orbiter for a 21-day solo cruise toward the haze-shrouded moon. Plunging into Titan's atmosphere, on January 14 2005, the probe survived the hazardous 2 hour 27 minute descent to touch down safely on Titan’s frozen surface. Today, the Cassini spacecraft remains in orbit at Saturn. Its mission will end in 2017, 20 years after its journey began. More information and images from the mission at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

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2025 July 24

Titan Shadow Transit
* Image Credit & Copyright: Volodymyr Andrienko

Explanation:
Every 15 years or so, Saturn's rings are tilted edge-on to our line of sight. As the bright, beautiful ring system grows narrower and fainter it becomes increasingly difficult to see for denizens of planet Earth. But it does provide the opportunity to watch transits of Saturn's moons and their dark shadows across the ringed gas giant's still bright disk. Of course Saturn's largest moon Titan is the easiest to spot in transit. In this telescopic snapshot from July 18, Titan itself is at the upper left, casting a round dark shadow on Saturn's banded cloudtops above the narrow rings. In fact Titan's transit season is in full swing now with shadow transits every 16 days corresponding to the moon's orbital period. Its final shadow transit will be on October 6, though Titan's pale disk will continue to cross in front of Saturn as seen from telescopes on planet Earth every 16 days through January 25, 2026.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250724.html

#space #moon #titan #astrophotography #photography #science #astronomy #nature #NASA

Titan Shadow Transit Season Underway

By Bob King

[...]
Titan transits occur only during the relatively brief time Earth and Saturn both lie nearly on the same plane, which coincides with when the rings appear approximately edge-on. Currently, we see the rings' south side, with the ring plane tilted between 2.7° (May 14th) and 3.2° (May 31st). The rings have been difficult to tease out since the planet's return to the morning sky. Not only have they been backlit by the Sun until recently, but Saturn also continues to lay low in the eastern sky at dawn, especially from mid-northern latitudes. Poor seeing coupled with bright twilight have made it difficult to discern much more than a pale-yellow ball. I finally succeeded on May 14th, when the rings flickered in and out of sight in my 10-inch Dob at 168×. They were nothing short of wispy — on the verge of invisibility.

Shadow transits are common at Jupiter, and they occur when one (or more) of the four Galilean satellites casts its shadow on the gas giant's cloud tops. The size of the dark spot is closely related to the size of the moon. Ganymede is the largest, with an apparent diameter of about 1.7″, and Europa the smallest at about 1.0″. Through the telescope, Ganymede's shadow is a definitive black dot, while Europa looks more like a pinpoint.
[...]

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/observing-news/titan-shadow-transit-season-underway/

#space #moon #titan #astrophotography #photography #science #astronomy #nature #NASA

[...]
Saturn's moons likewise cast shadows, with Titan's the easiest to see because it's the largest, with an apparent diameter of 0.8″at opposition on September 21st. This means you'll want to use at least a 3-inch telescope and magnification of 200× or more to discern the inky speck. At times, both moon and shadow will occupy the disk simultaneously. Titan itself appears somewhat smaller than its shadow and paler in tone. Even after the shadow portion of the transit series ends on October 6th, you can continue to observe the moon pass in front of Saturn every 16 days, through January 25, 2026.

When the current transit series began last November, timing favored Eastern Hemisphere observers. Now through early October, skywatchers in the Americas will get a crack at the shadow. Most of the transits occur after midnight, especially for the eastern half of the U.S. The table above lists the Universal Times (UT) of the start, midpoint, and end of each event. To convert to local times, use this UTC time zone converter https://dateful.com/convert/utc.
Notice that the transits occur every 16 days, which is Titan's orbital period.

Titan and its shadow gradually migrate northward across Saturn's oblate disk this spring and summer. The May 15th transit occurs across the planet's Equatorial Zone (EZ) and lasts nearly 6 hours. But on October 6th, when Titan's shadow nibbles the northern limb, the event lasts only about 2 hours.
[...]

Exerpt from:
"Titan Shadow Transit Season Underway"
By Bob King

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/observing-news/titan-shadow-transit-season-underway/

#space #moon #titan #astrophotography #photography #science #astronomy #nature #NASA