If you could stand on Titan -- what would you see?
The
featured color view from
Titan
gazes across an unfamiliar and distant landscape on
Saturn's largest moon.
The scene was recorded by
ESA's
Huygens probe in 2005 after a 2.5-hour
descent through a
thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane.
Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level,
rocks strewn about the scene could well be composed of water and
hydrocarbons
frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of negative 179 degrees C.
The large light-toned rock below and left of center is only
about 15 centimeters across and lies 85 centimeters away.
The
saucer-shaped spacecraft is believed to have
penetrated about 15 centimeters into a place on
Titan's surface
that had the consistency of
wet sand or clay.
Huygen's batteries enabled the probe to
take and transmit data for more than 90 minutes after landing.
Titan's
bizarre chemical environment
may bear similarities to planet Earth's before
life evolved.