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Saturn's Giant Moon: How Long Has Titan's Chemical Factory Been in Business?
Saturn's giant moon Titan hides within a thick, smoggy atmosphere that's well-known to scientists as one of the most complex chemical environments in the solar system. It's a productive "factory" cranking out hydrocarbons that rain down on Titan's icy surface, cloaking it in soot and, with a brutally cold surface temperature of around minus 270 degrees Fahrenheit, forming lakes of liquid methane and ethane.
Titan's dense atmosphere shrouds the moon beneath a tan haze in this image. Saturn's third-largest moon Dione can be seen through the Titan haze in this view of the two posing before the planet and its rings from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The rings, viewed nearly edge-on, appear as a horizontal line through the image. The rings cast shadows on Saturn, which appear as dark lines at the bottom of the image. The Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera made this image on May 21, 2011 at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Titan. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
Source:Science Daily
Saturn's Giant Moon: How Long Has Titan's Chemical Factory Been in Business?
Saturn's giant moon Titan hides within a thick, smoggy atmosphere that's well-known to scientists as one of the most complex chemical environments in the solar system. It's a productive "factory" cranking out hydrocarbons that rain down on Titan's icy surface, cloaking it in soot and, with a brutally cold surface temperature of around minus 270 degrees Fahrenheit, forming lakes of liquid methane and ethane.
Titan's dense atmosphere shrouds the moon beneath a tan haze in this image. Saturn's third-largest moon Dione can be seen through the Titan haze in this view of the two posing before the planet and its rings from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The rings, viewed nearly edge-on, appear as a horizontal line through the image. The rings cast shadows on Saturn, which appear as dark lines at the bottom of the image. The Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera made this image on May 21, 2011 at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Titan. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
Source:Science Daily
