Titan’s Veil
Titan is often described as Earth-like. Besides our home planet, it’s the only world in the Solar System to possess a dense molecular nitrogen (N2 ) atmosphere and an active hydrologic cycle — though Titan’s cycle doesn’t involve water. The atmospheric surface pressure on Titan is about 1½ times that at sea level on Earth, and its surface temperature is 94K (-179°C), conditions in which water is rock-hard ice.
Instead, Titan’s environment is very near the triple point of methane (CH4 ), which means that methane can exist as a solid, liquid or gas depending on local conditions. (Earth’s surface is similarly near the triple point of water.) The result is a marvelous world of lakes and seas, rivers carving channels into water-ice bedrock, and intense rainstorms of large droplets that occasionally punctuate the relative calm of extensive sand-dune fields — all made of methane and related compounds.
Much of our understanding of this landscape comes from 13 years of intensive study with the Cassini-Huygens mission, undertaken jointly by NASA and ESA. Before that, Titan’s thick atmosphere and characteristic orange haze largely obscured our view of the surface.
Although we often look at Venus and Mars to teach us about our world, Titan’s atmosphere is the best Solar System analog we have for the early Earth environment and an important place to study the chemistry that might have occurred in our planet’s atmosphere before life as we know it produced the large amount of molecular oxygen (O2 ) we now breathe. It might even give us the tools to recognise habitable planets around other stars.
A hydrocarbon laboratory
After molecular nitrogen, methane is the most abundant gas in Titan’s atmosphere (2% to nitrogen’s 98%). and CH molecules into pieces that react with each other to produce heavier byproducts, which eventually form Titan’s thick organic haze. This photochemistry is similar to the way that sunlight spurs the formation of smog here on Earth.
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