Cassini probe discovers dunes and mountains on Titan

On a recent close flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was able to capture images of fine details on the moon’s surface.

Among other things, the images revealed long straight dunes of what is thought to be hydrocarbon sand. These dunes were seen circling the majority of Titan’s equator. NASA scientists said studying the dunes can help them learn about winds, landscapes and the sands themselves.

“Dunes are dynamic features. They’re deflected by obstacles along the downwind path, often making beautiful, undulating patterns,” Jani Radebaugh, a Cassini radar team member from Brigham Young University, said in a news release.

The new Cassini images also showed a place previously dubbed the “Xanadu annex” by the Cassini radar team. Cassini’s radar had not taken pictures of this region, but previous measurements by the spacecraft indicated the terrain might be quite comparable to the large area on Titan named Xanadu, the first feature to be identified on Titan. The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Xanadu’s outline in 1994. The annex region went undetected until the Cassini mission.

Learning About Titan

The new Cassini image showed the Xanadu annex is comprised of the same kind of mountainous terrains identified in Xanadu and dispersed across other areas of Titan.

“This ‘annex’ looks quite similar to Xanadu using our radar, but there seems to be something different about the surface there that masks this similarity when observing at other wavelengths, as with Hubble,” said Mike Janssen, a member of the Cassini radar team. “It’s an interesting puzzle.”

Xanadu and its annex continue to be a bit of a mystery to NASA researchers. In other places on Titan, mountainous surfaces appear in small, separated patches, but Xanadu includes a large mountainous area. Scientists have proposed a range of theories on how it might have been created.

“These mountainous areas appear to be the oldest terrains on Titan, probably remnants of the icy crust before it was covered by organic sediments from the atmosphere,” said Rosaly Lopes, a Cassini radar team member. “Hiking in these rugged landscapes would likely be similar to hiking in the Badlands of South Dakota.”

Cassini has four remaining flybys left in its mission, and these passes will focus on the liquid lakes and seas in Titan’s northern hemisphere. In April 2017, the probe will perform a series of 22 orbits that will send it between Saturn and its icy rings.

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Image credit: NASA

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