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Moons · Saturn

Titan: the moon with lakes and weather

Titan, an orange moon with dark patches under a hazy sky, drawn from its maps in Exo-View

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is bigger than Mercury and the only moon with a thick atmosphere, denser than Earth's. It has rivers, lakes and seas, not of water but of liquid methane and ethane, and rain, clouds and dunes. Exo-View puts it where it is now, going round Saturn.

Fly to TitanSee Saturn
Orbit
15.9 days round Saturn, at 1.22 million km
Width
5,149 km, bigger than Mercury
Air
Mostly nitrogen, with about 1.5 times the pressure at the Earth's surface
Surface temperature
About −179 °C
Gravity
About one seventh of the Earth's
Found
In 1655 by Christiaan Huygens

Weather on a cold world

Titan's orange haze hides the surface from view, but radar and infrared cameras, and the Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, saw through it. They found dunes of dark organic grains, mountains, and lakes and seas near the poles, the largest bigger than the Caspian Sea. Methane does there what water does here: it evaporates, forms clouds, rains and carves river valleys.

The probe that landed

On 14 January 2005 Huygens, a probe carried by Cassini and built in Europe, parachuted through Titan's air and landed on its surface, the most distant landing ever made. It sent back pictures of a flat orange plain strewn with rounded pebbles of ice, for more than an hour. It is still the only landing on a moon in the outer solar system.

Next

NASA's Dragonfly, a rotorcraft the size of a small car, is due to launch in 2028 and arrive in 2034. In Titan's thick air and weak gravity it can fly from place to place, sampling the organic chemistry that may be like the Earth's before life began.

In Exo-View

The button below flies from the Sun to Titan, drawn from its surface maps. Open its plate for its figures, and fly on to Saturn and its rings.

Fly to TitanSee Saturn

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