Titan could be sibling to Earth

Titan could be sibling to Earth

The seven year sojourn of space vehicle Cassini to Titan crossed a milestone yesterday when the data reflected by its Huygens space probe was finally given articulation by scientists. Titan, they say, in web reports of the journal Nature, is like a sibling of Earth, resembling the latter's younger years.

For the uninitiated, Titan is the planet Saturn's satellite moon, under scientific scrutiny for the past one year, ever since the exploring instrument Huygens dislodged from its parent Cassini and landed on the moon's surface in January this year. Titan has often been the setting of many a fiction tale of human space adventures, mainly because of its unique atmosphere.

The Cassini space venture is a combined effort of NASA and the European Space Agency.

Huygens gathered findings while it traveled down to Titan for over two hours and later when it finally kissed the moon's surface. It was armed with measuring devices to read the atmospheric conditions as well as the geological nature of the moon's surface. On the way down, Huygens encountered a highly windy atmosphere, minus 333 degrees of freezing temperature and potential lightning.

Visually, Titan comes across as an orange ball of beauty enveloped in thick fog-like atmosphere. Deeper analysis has revealed high concentrations of methane and nitrogen forming that air, imparting the orange color and precipitating into a unique snow on the surface of the moon. This snow is soft but firm and covers the ice on the surface with about a kilometer high blanket. No big rocks were found to exist on the moon, though images do reveal tiny ice stones. The surface was seen as generally flat, with only a 3 feet variation to boast of. The high organic content of the surface was abundant with compounds like cyanogens and ethane, which were absent in the air.

It has been confirmed that the methane clouds in Titan's atmosphere super rotate the moon itself, hence creating the windy storm like personality of the atmosphere. These winds slow down progressively as the surface nears.

The air in proximity to the surface was methane wet, evaporating as soon as the heat of the probing Huygens came into contact.

Although Titan is a frozen moon, existing in an incipient hydrogen condition, it is the second entity in the solar crowd, after Earth, to possess a nitrogen heavy atmosphere.

Other similarities with Earth are a complicated weather system, land demarcations etched by liquid bodies and volcanic rumblings, which are however of a cold type. Summarily, Titan does strikingly mirror what Earth was in its formative years.

One data gathering device called the ACP studied particles in the methane clouds and found the existence of amino, imino, and nitrile group compounds, which are key protein builders on Earth. Though these particles bind together to aid cloud creation and influence temperature & air speed, these similarities do not conclusively indicate life on the Saturn moon. Moreover, the Titan atmosphere is devoid of oxygen.

Another instrument read the surface temperature as an average of minus 289 degrees Fahrenheit, which can easily support formation of liquid bodies of natural gas. The same instrument additionally discovered electric vibes resembling lightning on Earth.

Despite the newly found facts, some mysteries do remain. One such riddle is how the atmosphere is so pregnant with methane despite science having documented that the gas should have vanished over a period of 100 million years.
One possible explanation is the existence of life itself which can produce methane. But the carbon configuration found on Titan does not indicate life.

Another mystery baffling scientists is the presence of a pocket of no wind speed, in the height above the surface ranging from 62 to 37 miles.

The only possibility of life on Titan could be below the moon's surface, since there could be water existing unexplored there. According to scientists, only water in its liquid form could support life on the Saturn moon.

Even though the life factor remains mysterious, Earth and Titan do seem to belong to the same family tree.