Tthe Exploration of Titan

EXPLORATION OF TITAN The Exploration of Titan Ralph D. Lorenz he exploration of Saturn’s moon Titan is reviewed, noting the dramatic recent improvements in our knowledge of this strange world from the ongoing international Cassini-Huygens mission, results from which are summarized. Among Cassini’s discoveries are the remarkable richness and complexity of its organic chemistry, a strikingly Earth-like landscape with hydrocarbon lakes and seas, and vast fields of organic sand dunes interspersed with craters and icy mountains. The breadth of scientific questions posed by Titan’s Earth-like landscape and meteorology, and its organic-rich prebiotic chemistry, set the stage for Titan to become a key target for future solar system exploration, possibly by aircraft exploiting its thick atmosphere and Tlow gravity. INTRODUCTION The most Earth-like body in the solar system is not (“cryovolcanism”), by rivers of liquid methane, and by another planet but Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.1 Indeed, tidally driven winds that sculpt drifts of aromatic organ- if Titan orbited the Sun rather than Saturn, we would ics into long linear dunes. Until only 3 years ago, little of not hesitate to call it a planet in its own right. This this was known. strange new world is larger than the planet Mercury The dramatic and surprising results obtained from and has a thick nitrogen atmosphere laden with organic the Cassini-Huygens mission2 have shown Titan to be smog, which hid its surface from view until only recently much more diverse and complicated than had been (Fig. 1). Since Titan is far from the Sun, methane plays thought, making it much more than just an icy satellite the active role there that water plays on Earth, serving with an atmosphere. as a condensable greenhouse gas, forming clouds and rain, and pooling on the surface as lakes. Titan’s icy sur- EXPLORATION HISTORY face is shaped not only by impact craters and tectonics Titan was discovered in 1655 by the Dutchman but also by volcanism in which the lava is liquid water Christiaan Huygens, who realized simultaneously that JOHNS HopKinS APL TECHniCal DIGEST, VolUME 27, NUMBer 2 (2006) 133 R. D. LORENZ contradictory: a thick atmosphere would reflect blue and UV light more brightly than the space-borne observations (just as our own sky is blue), but the warm temperatures implied by the ground-based thermal data required a thick atmosphere. Observations from the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it flew by Titan in 1980 resolved the matter, showing both “end members” to be partly correct. Voyager showed Titan’s atmosphere to be like Earth’s, made predominantly (>90%) of molecular nitrogen and having a surface pressure of 150 kPa and a temperature around 94 K, indicating its “sea-level” air density to be 4 times higher than Earth’s. Methane makes up about 1.5% of Titan’s stratosphere, although (much like water vapor in the Earth’s troposphere) its abundance increases somewhat nearer the ground. Indeed, the temperature pro- file indicated by Voyager showed Titan to have a very Earth-like atmospheric structure, but one that was colder and vertically stretched in the low gravity, i.e., temperatures slowly fall with altitude from the surface Figure 1. A false-color composite of Cassini International Space upward to the chilly tropopause at 40 km. And just Station (ISS) images. The blue is rendered from a UV filter, making as with water vapor on Earth, Titan’s tropopause acts it particularly responsive to high-altitude haze, which appears as a “cold trap” for methane, which is a condensable especially abundant over the northern polar region (north is up). greenhouse gas. At higher altitudes, local absorption The tan is generated from a near-IR filter in a methane absorption of sunlight (on Earth by ozone, on Titan by the haze band: the northern hemisphere has more haze lying above the bulk discussed below) causes temperatures to rise with alti- of the methane, hence it is more tan. The green channel is from a tude, forming a stable stratosphere. It is this warm, near-IR “window” that penetrates to the surface, showing the irreg- stable stratosphere that causes the large thermal ular “coastline” at left. The irregular white patch at the bottom is a fluxes observed from Earth. complex of tropospheric clouds around the south pole, which were It had been suspected from Titan’s reddish color observed to move and evolve over periods of a few hours. (Image and the polarization of its light that its atmosphere courtesy of NASA/JPL/Ciclops/University of Arizona.) might be hazy, and indeed it is this haze that prevents Titan’s sky from being blue. Because it absorbs around half of the sunlight incident on Titan, the haze is a Saturn’s rings (seen only as fuzzy blobs before his high- major factor in controlling Titan’s climate: together quality telescope was trained on the planet) were just that, with the condensable greenhouse gas (methane), the rings defining a plane, and that a satellite, later named haze opens Titan to many interesting climate feed- Titan, orbited in that plane once every 16 Earth days. back processes. Huygens was a remarkable thinker and considered that, A further intriguing analogy with Earth is the “polar absent any information to the contrary, other planetary hood” observed by Voyager (and also by Cassini; see bodies must be Earth-like. He even noted that the outer Fig. 2). There is a seasonally variable enhancement of planets, being so far from the Sun, would be very cold and haze opacity over the winter polar regions, which are thus their clouds and rain would have to be made of some- dynamically isolated from the rest of the atmosphere thing other than water. by a circumpolar vortex. A similar effect occurs on Another Dutchman, Gerard Kuiper, working in the Earth where polar stratospheric clouds form in the United States in 1944, discovered this other something cold winter darkness but are kept from dispersing by on Titan: dark bands in the spectrum of sunlight reflected the circumpolar winds, especially around Antarctica. by Titan matched those of methane measured in the labo- On Earth, these clouds are instrumental in the catal- ratory. This immediately made Titan unique among the ysis of ozone destruction, and so are responsible for satellites in the solar system—it had an atmosphere. the formation of the ozone hole. Titan’s chemistry is Even through the 1970s, with the first space-borne very different, but the physical setting and the pecu- observations of Titan (in the UV by the Orbiting Astro- liar processes occurring in its polar night may have nomical Observatory-2) together with thermal IR obser- much to teach us about Earth. vations from the ground, the thickness of this atmosphere Titan’s haze is produced by the destruction of meth- was unknown. The early observations seemed mutually ane by solar UV light and the bombardment of the 134 JOHNS HopKinS APL TECHniCal DIGEST, VolUME 27, NUMBer 2 (2006) EXPLORATION OF TITAN the bright/dark dichotomy on Iapetus, the fresh surface of Enceladus, and the E-ring, among others) a follow- on mission was proposed. That mission opened up two new dimensions compared with Galileo (the follow-on mission to Jupiter). First, while Galileo’s tour at Jupi- ter made multiple encounters with the planet’s four large satellites that orbit in a plane, Cassini’s orbital tour was three-dimensional—the inclination of the spacecraft’s orbital plane could be cranked upward to look down on the rings and Saturn’s polar regions. In the Saturnian system, only Titan is massive enough to usefully alter the spacecraft’s orbit (a “slingshot” or gravity assist), so Cassini’s orbital tour was constructed by chaining one Titan flyby after another, with each flyby changing the orbital period, the orientation in its plane, or its inclination. With a 4-year tour making many dozens of orbits, the number of possible tours was enormous. The second added dimension, that is, international participation, has been more significant. Although Figure 2. Cassini ISS images show striking structure in the atmo- NASA had studied follow-on Saturnian and Titan mis- spheric haze. The north polar region (top) features a particularly sions, notably SO2P (Saturn Orbiter with Two Probes, complex structure (the “North Polar Hood”). The main orange one for Titan and one for Saturn), the Cassini mission in haze deck, as well as the “detached haze” (which appears dynami- its modern form originated in an international proposal cally connected to the polar hood), has somewhat different opti- to the European Space Agency (ESA). Several years of cal properties. The lower panel shows a close-up example of the joint studies followed, culminating in a new start for rich, layered structure in the haze (“up” is to the right.) (Images Cassini as part (subsequent cancellations were to make courtesy of NASA/JPL/Ciclops.) it the only part) of the Mariner Mark II series in NASA’s program in 1989, and the selection of a Titan probe for Cassini, to be named Huygens, as ESA’s second medium- atmosphere by energetic particles in Saturn’s magneto- class mission. sphere. Titan orbits 1.2 million kilometers from Saturn In addition to the ESA contribution of the probe and (20 Saturn radii) so that it is sometimes inside the mag- its support systems, its member states and the United netosphere but outside during periods of stronger solar States provided instruments for both the Huygens probe wind. Titan’s ionosphere is therefore exposed to various and the orbiter spacecraft, making both elements truly combinations of sunlight, solar wind, and Saturn’s mag- international endeavors.

Load more