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Titan is a moon of Saturn.

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It’s the second largest moon in the Solar System
and it is about two times larger

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than Earth’s Moon and actually bigger than
the planet Mercury.

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Titan is also interesting – it’s the only moon in
our Solar System with an atmosphere.

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It’s surrounded by sort of an envelope of
gaseous nitrogen

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just like our own Earth is.

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Titan was first discovered by telescope
observations back in the mid-1600's.

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The first spacecraft observations were made of
Titan during flybys through

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the outer Solar System – that was in the late
seventies and in the eighties.

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But we really were able to explore Titan in-depth
with the Cassini-Huygens mission.

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The Huygens probe was dropped into the
atmosphere of Titan,

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and it made measurements of chemistry, and it
took images as it fell to the surface,

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and that was back in 2005.

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And since then, the Cassini Orbiter made over
a hundred close flybys of Titan.

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Cassini in its design with the different
instruments – we purposely were picking

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instruments that could go into longer
wavelengths into the infrared

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so we could really understand the moon.

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We were able to basically peel back the
layers of Titan

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to really see what was below, and it was
remarkable – very Earthlike.

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The landscape is similar to Earth’s in many,
many ways, but with a little bit of a twist.

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So on Titan, you can find dunes, you find lakes,
there are river channels,

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the atmosphere is very dense and you can get
clouds and smog and you even get rain.

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We saw winds, we saw seasons, and one really
important thing we saw was liquids

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pooling in the polar regions on the surface –
a lot of it.

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But because Titan is so cold, those features are
all made of very exotic materials

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compared to what we would find on Earth.

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So the lakes and the rain are made of liquid
methane, the crust that forms

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the surface of Titan is actually water ice, but it’s
so cold that it's as hard as rock,

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and in the atmosphere we get this organic
chemistry that forms large

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organic molecules and particulates – they
fall down to the surface

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and then behave like dust or like sand does.

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So it makes us want to go back to really
understand the complex,

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organic environment of that surface and what it means

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for either past life or maybe future life.

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