The Weary Titan

Now, another satellite also attracted a lot of attention, and that's Titan. And the reason Titan is particularly interesting, it's a satellite bigger than our moon, and it has an atmosphere.

(b) Human missions to Europa and Titan , by the observer for ISU.

And those are Titan and Enceladus. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived there, was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system.

Thus, the distant and cold Titan, Triton, and Pluto are able to retain their atmospheres despite relatively low gravities.

Perhaps no one's achievement should be judged by comparison with that of Wallenberg a titan of strength, courage, and perseverance.

Titan is a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects.

Seven moons are large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium, including Titan, the second largest moon in the Solar System.

But this is what we suspected. And these molecules, especially methane and ethane, can be liquids at the surface temperatures of Titan.

An increasingly uncompetitive civilian industry, the burden of military commitments overseas, wage stagnation all signal that the American titan may be wearying.

Titan was the prototype of the Atlas 2 computer developed by Ferranti and the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in Cambridge, England.

In addition, he discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars and the existence of a methane laced atmosphere above Saturn's satellite Titan in 1944.

Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shows images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn, focusing on its largest moon, Titan, and on frozen Enceladus, which seems to shoot jets of ice.

So if you were on Titan, you would feel the same pressure that you feel in here. Except it's a lot colder, and that atmosphere is heavily made of methane.

But we couldn't make sense of our images, until, six months after we got into orbit, an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of Cassini's investigation of Titan.

And it's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of Titan through these channels that we saw, and has drained over billions of years to fill in low lying basins.

Perhaps no one's achievement should be judged by comparison with that of Wallenberg a titan of strength, courage, and perseverance. The trouble with Annan is that, when similar perils loomed, he proved especially wanting.

OK, so this is our movie of the equatorial region of Titan, showing these dunes. These are dunes that are 100 meters tall, separated by a few kilometers, and they go on for miles and miles and miles.

So people believe now that Titan is most likely what we call a pre biotic planet, because it's so cold organic material did not get to the stage of becoming biological material, and therefore life could have evolved on it.

And so now we go onto Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon, it's about a tenth the size of Titan. And you can see it here next to England, just to show you the size. This is not meant to be a threat.

But here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon, Titan, which is larger that the planet Mercury, diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase.

And that was the deployment of the Huygens probe, the European built Huygens probe that Cassini had carried for seven years across the solar system. We deployed it to the atmosphere of Titan, it took two and a half hours to descend, and it landed on the surface.

And I think you would agree that we have found Titan is a remarkable, mystical place. It's exotic, it's alien, but yet strangely Earth like, and having Earth like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity, and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the Earth itself.

See also 4000 metre peaks of Canada 4000 metre peaks of North America List of highest points of Canadian provinces and territories Mountain peaks of Canada Mountain peaks of North America List of Ultras in Canada Bibliography References External links Mount Logan on Peakware photos Map showing location of Mount Logan in the Saint Elias Range 2009 Trip Report Mount Logan Canadian Titan Virtual Museum of Canada