Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Synthetic aperture radar image mosaic of Titan's north polar region. Vid Flumina is a river system (termed Flumen) of liquid methane and ethane on Saturn's moon Titan.It is more than 400 km (249 mi) long and flows into Titan's second largest hydrocarbon sea, Ligeia Mare. [1]
The atmosphere of Titan is the dense layer of gases surrounding Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.Titan is the only natural satellite of a planet in the Solar System with an atmosphere that is denser than the atmosphere of Earth and is one of two moons with an atmosphere significant enough to drive weather (the other being the atmosphere of Triton). [4]
In September 2006, Cassini imaged a large cloud at a height of 40 km over Titan's north pole. Although methane is known to condense in Titan's atmosphere, the cloud was more likely to be ethane, as the detected size of the particles was only 1–3 micrometers and ethane can also freeze at these altitudes
Titans obliquity at 26.7° is high enough to cause seasonal variations within the stratospheric spin. [4] Attempts to model super-rotation on the gas giants, including Titan, has been abundant. The first observations of Titan in the 1980's revealed little information about circulation within the atmosphere due to the low contrast photochemical ...
NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its icy moons, including the majestic Titan, ended its mission with a death plunge into the giant ringed planet in 2017. Cassini's radar ...
This acts to reduce solar energy reaching the surface and lets infrared energy escape, cooling Titan's surface. Titan has both a greenhouse and an anti-greenhouse effect which compete with one another. The greenhouse effect warms Titan by 21 K while the anti-greenhouse effect cools Titan by 9 K, so the net warming is 12 K (= 21 K - 9 K). [3] [4]
Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity mean that the flight power for a given mass is a factor of about 40 times lower than on Earth. [3] The atmosphere has 1.45 times the pressure and about four times the density of Earth's, and local gravity (13.8% of Earth's) make flight easier than on Earth, although cold temperatures, lower light levels ...
Mosaic of three Huygens images of channel system on Titan. The possibility of hydrocarbon seas on Titan was first suggested based on Voyager 1 and 2 data that showed Titan to have a thick atmosphere of approximately the correct temperature and composition to support them, but direct evidence was not obtained until 1995 when data from Hubble and other observations suggested the existence of ...