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Thanks to the Near-Infrared Camera on James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have confirmed Titan has weather. NIRCam picked up a bright blotch in the satellite’s northern hemisphere. It might not look like much in the image but researchers were thrilled because they knew it was really a cloud they were seeing. Then they saw a second one. These aren’t normal clouds of water vapor though. Not by a long shot.
Hydrocarbon Atmosphere of Titan
It’s actually possible for humans to colonize Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It would seem a lot like living in you’re vehicle’s gas tank, if you parked in the Antarctic.
Life on the surface wouldn’t really be possible, although walking around on it in a suit would be. Colonists would likely live in massive tunnels. Arthur C. Clarke once envisioned it’s use as a “refueling” station for spacecraft.
The images of Titan actually beamed down to Earth in November but NASA didn’t unveil them until December. According to Margaret Carruthers from the Space Telescope Science Institute, “a team of researchers used Webb’s infrared vision to study Titan’s atmosphere, including its fascinating weather patterns and gaseous composition.”
The really amazing part is the ultra-sensitive high tech equipment “enabled the team to see through the haze to study bright and dark patches on the surface.”
The atmosphere on Titan is incredibly interesting. Mostly because it has one. The clouds and storms they spotted were mostly methane vapor. The experts can tell a whole lot more than you would imagine just from studying the current composition.
It tells them whether the distant world “always had an atmosphere.” Along with being the only piece of non-planetary real estate beyond Mars with a dense atmosphere, it’s a lot like Earth in other ways.
A similar surface to Earth
In a bizarre way, Titan is more like Earth than most folks imagine. It has rivers, lakes and seas to drive the rain and snow weather patterns.
The similarity ends there though because, unlike Earth, Titan’s surface is covered with “hydrocarbons including methane and ethane, not water.” It’s so full of haze that visible light reflecting off the surface is obscured.
The two clouds Carruthers and his team discovered match the predictions of computer models which “predicted that clouds would form readily in the mid-northern hemisphere during its late summertime when the surface is warmed by the Sun.”
He’s more excited that the computer model was accurate than actually finding the clouds. In the two images NASA shared of Titan, “the image seen on the left has been captured using F212N, a 2.12-micron filter sensitive to Titan’s lower atmosphere. The bright spots seen on the moon are prominent clouds in the northern hemisphere.” On the right, “is a colour-composite image captured using a combination of NIRCam filters. Some of the prominent surface features labeled on the image are Kraken Mare, Belet and Adiri. Kraken Mare is thought to be a methane sea, Adiri is a bright albedo feature (fraction of light reflected by a body), and Belet is composed of dark-colored sand dunes.”
Those sand dunes are funky things all on their own, probably made up of “tholins.” That’s a term “coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry.”
Carruthers pointed out that the clouds they spotted on Titan made them realize they need to know if they’re moving and how. They asked Keck Observatory in Hawai’i to follow that up for them. “The follow-up observations made using Keck Observatory confirmed seasonal weather patterns on Titan.“
