This was taken 20 years ago, and always baffled me. The wikipedia description says it is "showing hills and topographical features that resemble a shoreline and drainage channels", and to my untrained eyes, it really does look like a methane lake on the bottom of the picture, with waves and all.
However, this was taken during Huygens' descent, and it is a well known fact that the probe landed on dry land.
What gives? Does this picture look like a shoreline, but isn't, or does it depict a spot far away from the landing site?
https://i.redd.it/x3u6q3kfxhqf1.jpeg
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[https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07231](https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07231)
“It shows the boundary between the lighter-colored uplifted terrain, marked with what appear to be drainage channels, and darker lower areas.”
It’s believed to be former/seasonal lake’s bottom or features formed via seasonal liquid flow.
Soil was resembling moisturised clay by its mechanical properties (but it’s not literally clay!).
Liquid hydrocarbons can’t exist in tropical/equatorial regions of Titan for a long time, they are evaporating quickly. That’s why all stable liquid bodies are located in proximity of the poles.
Huygens landed in near-equatorial latitude.
Was about to say it also looks foggy, then I just learned fog can be made up of various different elements as compared to the water vapor fog we see here on earth, and that the fog seen on Titan, and likely in this pic as well, consists of evaporated liquid methane. Sorry if you already knew this, I just learned it* ☺️
To me, that looks like a foggy coast line made of liquid methane.
Don’t know, but an amazing photo of an alien planet.
Shore looks like it doesn’t it?
(Please excuse the bad pun/dad joke, but that was the first thing that ran through my mind when I saw the pic 🤣)
Yes. Titan is covered in lakes of liquid methane.
Cassini Huygens is probably my favorite deep space mission of all time. Whenever I see pictures and data from the Huygens probe I get a desperate urge for wanting to explore these distant worlds
Here’s hoping the Dragonfly mission amounts to something. But the distance to Saturn is a little worrying. To explore these places, time flies in the eyes of human mortality. To see HD footage from Titan would be a dream come true
How have we not sunk huge money into Titan and Europa is something I’ll never understand. When is a rover landing there…