Sailing the forbidden seas

This is my impression of the lake lander and the Titan landscape.

This month, The Titan Mare Explorer mission was given, together with two other proposed space exploration programs, a US$3 million in funding for further development. Next year, NASA will pick one of them and fund it all the way into space.

Ever since I first read about the Titan Mare Mission I’ve had this image in my mind, of the capsule floating about on the lakes of Titan.

Let me just say a few words about Titan and why I’m excited by it. Titan is the biggest moon of Saturn, and the second biggest moon in the solar system. In fact, the term moon is not doing it justice, it’s bigger than the planet Mercury and somewhat smaller than Mars.  Had it been orbiting the sun here in the inner solar system, it would blend perfectly with our little family of terrestrial planets.

Titan might be the most Earth like place in our solar system. It has a thick atmosphere, with clouds and rain, it has lakes, rivers, volcanoes and mountain ranges. Knowing that Titan is located around Saturn,  way outside the “goldilock zone”, where water can’t exist in liquid form one might wonder how it can be so Earth like. Well it isn’t water that falls like rain from the skies of Titan, and it isn’t water that make up its lakes and rivers. It’s methane and ethane. The surface temperature on Titan is about minus 180 degrees celsius which puts methane and ethane in a liquid state. Since it’s so cold, water ice plays the same role as silicate rocks do here on Earth, forming mountain ranges and shorelines, slowly being eroded and sculpted by the flow of winds and liquids. On Earth the sky is blue, but on Titan it is colored yellow by an eternal haze of organic particles that fall from high up in the atmosphere. This is for me as an artist extremely interesting since Titan is being exposed to the same forces that shapes the landscape here on Earth, but of a totally different version. The landscapes of Earth is one way to do it, the landscapes of Titan is another.

Specular reflection in one of the lakes of Titan. Photo was taken by the Cassini probe in 2009.

The hazy top layer of Titans atmosphere, photographed by the Cassini probe from a distance of 9500 kilometers.