A Titan of a Mission
Parachuting through smog to Saturn's moon
By Ron Cowen
On Jan. 14, a flying saucer will parachute through the thick orange haze of a distant moon’s atmosphere. Descending through the hydrocarbon smog, the probe could crash into an icy mountain, plop in a pool of organic goo, or dive into a methane ocean. Welcome to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, a place where organic chemistry appears to be a carbon copy of the infant Earth’s just before life got a foothold. The saucer-shaped Huygens probe, named for the 17th-century Dutch astronomer who discovered Titan, has been riding piggyback on the Cassini spacecraft since it left Earth in October 1997. The craft arrived at Saturn on June 30 and has now embarked on a 4-year tour of the planet and its moons.
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Radar data from Cassini, taken during its first close flyby of Titan on Oct. 26, reveal dark patches that might be lakes of methane. Streaks imaged by visible-light cameras during that flyby could be caused by the flow of a hydrocarbon fluid or by wind eroding solid material (SN: 11/6/04, p. 291: Available to subscribers at Titanic Close-up: Cassini eyes Saturn’s big moon).