<![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings - io9 Comments]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings - io9 Comments]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> Surface wind speeds on Titan are on the order of a meter per second (around 4 miles per hour) on a breezy day. That dunes form at all is pretty amazing. That there is eroded material on a body where very little liquid has been seen, and precipitation (like methane rains) are non-existent away from the poles is astounding. We haven't seen all of Titan's secrets by a long shot. It's a bit premature to call it a cold Earth analog. Some things looks similar to Earth land forms but explaining why will thake a lot of papers and theses.

Gopherit

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> The space probe also gave up-close view of the surface of this moon, perhaps most famous for being the place where the aliens of 2001 have left a second monolith

As mentioned earlier, the second monolith is located on the surface of Iapetus, but in the 2001 movie (and the 2010 book and movie), the second monolith is in orbit around Jupiter.

Chris Barrus

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> @GemmaSama: Appears to be a Planetist. For shame.

OldDog1

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> Wow look at those dunes.
Can't see any spice though. And any pic without a sandworm ravaging some harvester seems dry.

Mircea Suciu

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> @GemmaSama: So you slam Froggy for being interested in pictures of another world, then tell everyone we should really be pondering the rock we're all stuck on. For all your eloquence, how very pedestrian of you!

You do realize this is a Science Fiction site right?

For a lesser being like myself, I'm always humbled by pictures like these.

Pwnieboy

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> @CargoCult: Ah, it was parked in the exact center of the light colored hemisphere. The book describes it as looking into a gigantic eye. Man, what a creepy section of the book.

Rybanis

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> @GemmaSama: Our own planet's beauty is no excuse to not admire the beauty of other planets.

Brock

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> @Rybanis:
It's Mimas with the Death Star crater - Iapetus is altogether stranger, with one hemisphere black, and the other white.

There should be a big, chunky monolith either parked in the middle of the white side or the black side, I forget which. But if you can't find it, there's always the bizarre equatorial ridge to marvel at. I think one theory for its formation was that it's where one of Saturn's rings has collided with the moon, depositing a long chain of debris. There are other, more plausible theories - but nobody knows for sure how it formed...

CargoCult

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> @froggy:
The atmosphere's mostly nitrogen with a smidgen of methane - the only reason it sticks around on a body with such weak gravity (on the surface, about a seventh that of Earth's) is because the place is so bitterly cold.

The sand? Possibly tiny grains of water ice, eroded from the ice bedrock by liquid methane and ethane. There's a rough equivalent of the Earth's water cycle, with methane/ethane clouds producing rain, which collects and evaporates again - all working at way lower temperature than on Earth.

I think when the Huygens probe took those first aerial photos, floating down through the atmosphere on a parachute, scientists were surprised less by the strange novelty of what they saw, but more the fact that it all looked so familiar to us Earth-dwellers.

Titan was supposed to be a nightmarish, alien place - but it's actually rather homely. If a bit chilly, mind...

CargoCult

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> @AlfaCharger: Yeah, wasn't it sitting in the center of that enormous crater?

Rybanis

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> Epimetheus is so tiny!

92BuickLeSabre

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> Certainly the consideration of liquified gas can spark the imagination beyond that of the quotidian treatment as given by froggy. But I agree in part that much of the landscape details of other planetary bodies in our solar system simply do not warrant unmitigated wonder and excitement. Our own planet contains some of the most fantastic varieties of landscape and formation, even if the temperatures are not extreme.

GemmaSama

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> Correction, the second monolith in the novel 2001 was on Iapetus, not Epimetheus.

AlfaCharger

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> Plus liquid natural gas instead of water!

Log1c

]]> <![CDATA[Titan Rises Behind Saturn's Rings]]> so you have an atmosphere on a rocky planet, who has enough heat to generate changes in pressure, and thus wind... which generates enough erosion to create sand. which gets blown into dunes... by the wind...

WOW!

froggy

]]>