The Sierras of Titan

eldavojohn writes "Cassini has detected the tallest mountains on Titan, a large moon of Saturn. More importantly, clouds have also been detected in Titan's atmosphere. Why is this news important? Well, as scientists scan the skies for the easiest piece of mass to colonize, things that resemble Earth's geology & atmosphere are going to require the least effort & resources. These mountains mean that Titan may have tectonic plate movement similar in some ways to earth's. From the article, '"You can think of Titan as the Earth in deep freeze," said Dr Rosaly Lopes, Cassini radar team member at the US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It has a lot of the geological processes that Earth has. In fact, it is more Earth-like than anywhere else in the Solar System. But the surface is very cold; it's about minus 178C."'"

Comments

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

[eldavojohn]

I titled this article "The Sierras of Titan" as a pun for Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s early sci-fi novel 'The Sirens of Titan." The book means a lot to me so I heavily recommend it but before you mod me offtopic, let me explain why Vonnegut picked Titan, of all the mass in the galaxy.

There have been experiments on the abundant chemicals on Titan done by astronautical & nuclear engineer Robert Zubrin who has been quite influential in the proliferation of humans to other pieces of mass ASAP.

While you may be able to argue that these experiments were too early or had inherent flaws within them, they were done to try to prove that a "chemical revolution" could occur on Titan similar to what we theorize happened on earth early on. I haven't heard many people address the fact that it could have taken billion of years to progress on earth but I am quite interested to see if there is a way to engineer bacteria to break methane down into oxygen or some other gas that we could potentially exploit to make oxygen.

As you may have seen in other media, Titan is often used because of these experiments. It's a bit of a romantic dream but these mountains are just a little more to add to the possibility.

Oh, I also forgot to include a link to the Cassini-Huygens mission which has images, videos, wallpapers and all that jazz of Titan and its mountains.

Not a good place to colonize

[EccentricAnomaly]

Titan is not a good place to colonize because it is cold.... cold, cold, cold. Not only would you have to keep your colony on Xanadu warm from the cold, but you'd have to keep your warmth in or you would melt through the surface (which is 'rocks' made up of water ice). When Huygens landed it evaporated a cloud of frozen methane just from its measly heat... a whole colony would probably touch off a cryovolcano eruption.

Titan isn't a good place to live, but it is an awesome place to explore. Imagine a hot air balloon flying over these mountains and the lakes and rivers and the giant sand dune seas. Without UV from the sun to degrade the balloon's envelope and with plutonium to heat up the air inside such a balloon could last pretty much forever.... or at least until the plutonium is used up.

Re:Not a good place to colonize

[b0s0z0ku]

you would melt through the surface (which is 'rocks' made up of water ice).

Two possible solutions:

(1) restrict the inside of the colony to 0C. Not unthinkable - keep in mind that the native peoples of the Arctic used to live in ice houses. Place a nuclear reactor on stilts on top of the ice layer and transmit power to the colony using electricity or even insulated steam piping.

(2) how deep is the ice layer? Melt through and place the colony either in a pit or at the bottom of a columnar artificial lake with an access tunnel to the surface.

-b.

Re:Not a good place to colonize

[Rei]

0C isn't enough. There's large amounts of other frozen hydrocarbons in the soil as well.

The Earth analog -- a simpler challenge, but a challenge nonetheless -- is permafrost. If you build a house on the ground in many parts of Alaska, your foundation will crack as you slowly melt the permafrost beneath you. One solution is to build the house on stilts to leave an airspace beneath you. A more extreme option is used by the trans-alaska pipeline, which has heated fluids moving through it. Parts of the pipine are supported by columns that contain ammonia and extend into the permafrost. In the summer, the permafrost loses heat as usual, but in the winter, they get a cycle of ammonia boiling off in the permafrost, rising, cooling on the radiators, and descending to chill the permafrost down. They basically store up their summer heat during the winter.

Oh, and the ice on Titan is extremely deep. Much of the planet, actually.

Re:Not a good place to colonize

[Rei]

I saw a review of proposed methods to explore Titan. They considered balloons (not hot air -- helium. Keeping air hot would use too much energy), blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and non-fixed wing aircraft. Power was assumed to be from an RTG (radiothermal generator). Balloons were cheapest, but gave you no control over your route. Blimps were next cheapest and gave you route control, but were still very slow. Helicopters gave you fast movement, and were seen as an attractive propsect. They cannot stay aloft all the time, but simply fly for a few hours, land, and study the surface/communicate with Earth while the RTGs recharge their flight batteries. Fixed-wing aircraft were argued against because they would be subject to the same constraints, but couldn't land safely. Non-fixed wing aircraft were seen as the best, although most expensive, option. They can land safely for recharging like a helicopter, but can move at much higher speeds, thus allowing the probe to cover more ground.

One thing noted for all landings was that they would essentially have to be autonomous. You don't have the luxury of having a human review landing sites because the latency is too long for the vehicle to wait for you to tell it where to go. So, it will involve software that picks terrain features that look "interesting". Humans can tell it which way to go when it leaves next, and modify its priorities for what it views as "interesting", but the actual choice will be up to the craft.

I can't wait to see a mission like this get underway. :)

All these worlds are yours...

[thedaven]

Except Europa

Interesting find...

[Kranfer]

While I find this interesting, it is nothing new to see mountains on planetary objects besides Earth. The thing I find most interesting is the organic compounds that have been found/thought to be on Titan. It makes a very interesting spot to create a waystation in the distand future. Titan, and well as Io and Europia are very interesting moons that we should explore more. But I doubt the American public is very willing to fund more in depth explorations of these places... I can only hope. Although, I wonder what the new probe on its way to Pluto will find.