Titan - a museum of the Earth's atmosphere

Titan and its mysterious atmosphere

Source: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Titan, the largest moon of the planet Saturn, has an atmosphere that is predominantly nitrogen with a small amount of carbon present in the form of methane and higher hydrocarbons.

Interest in the composition of Titan's atmosphere initiated the Cassini-Huygens mission in 1997, which reached the Saturnian system in 2004. The Huygens' probe (named after the Dutch astronomer who discovered Titan in 1655) was deployed from the Cassini orbiter on Christmas Day 2004 and began its brief two-hour journey through Titan's atmosphere on 14 January 2005. On board was a range of instruments designed to probe both the composition of the atmosphere and the aerosol haze that shrouds Titan.2 Data from Huygens should be able to answer many of the questions posed by astronomers over the years, including: What is the nature of Titan's surface?; Are there lakes of liquid hydrocarbons or volcanoes spewing material into the atmosphere?; and What is the composition of the atmosphere and aerosol? But possibly the one major unanswered question is: Does Titan's atmosphere contain amino acids or other precursor molecules of life? 

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