Eric Mack
Contributor
I cover science and innovation and products and policies they create.
Dec 2, 2022
Dust storm of the surface of Titan, illustration. Titan, the largest moon of Saturn
Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the weirdest and most intriguing worlds in our solar system. It is the only place we know of in the universe for sure beyond Earth that has rivers, lakes and larger bodies of liquid, but on Titan these features are filled with flammable hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.
Studying Titan in depth has been difficult due to a thick atmosphere of clouds and haze, but NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of those clouds, and by extension, the weather patterns at work on this unique world.
"We had waited for years to use Webb's infrared vision to study Titan's atmosphere,” said JWST Principal Investigator Conor Nixon. “Detecting clouds is exciting because it validates long-held predictions from computer models about Titan’s climate, that clouds would form readily in the mid-northern hemisphere during its late summertime when the surface is warmed by the Sun.”
JWST’s advanced instruments also allow astronomers to determine the altitudes of the clouds with a higher degree of confidence.
Further observations from Keck Observatory telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii helped confirm that scientists were in fact seeing clouds and that they appeared to be shifting subtly.
“We were concerned that the clouds would be gone when we looked at Titan one and two days later with Keck, but to our delight there were clouds at the same positions, looking like they might have changed in shape,” said University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Imke de Pater.
The data is exciting for a number of researchers like Maël Es-Sayeh, a graduate student at the Université Paris Cité, who have had to rely on computer models to investigate Titan for years.
“It's very exciting to finally get the real data after years of simulations. I can't wait to see what will come in part two next year.”
Observations of Titan from Webb and other telescopes well help inform NASA’s planned Dragonfly mission to the moon, which will send a helicopter-like lander to explore it further and look for signs of life. That mission is currently scheduled for launch in 2027.
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