The Webb Space Telescope captured this image of Saturn’s moon Titan last month, which has now been released for your viewing pleasure. The images provide a detailed and up-to-date view of Titan’s atmosphere, including its strange surface elements.
The telescope’s NIRCam instrument, which takes images in the near-infrared range, captured the view. The clouds appear in Titan’s atmosphere (eccentrically labeled A and B in the annotated image), but are also seen hazy over Kraken Mare, thought to be a sea of methane, as well as dark sand dunes.
More data from Titan is expected from Webb’s instruments, including NIRSpec, which can assess a planet’s chemical makeup, for example It has already happened with distant exoplanets— in May or June 2023.
Titan is about 50% larger than Earth’s moon. It is the only moon in the solar system with a large (nitrogen-dominated) atmosphere. A place right near the ground It is known that there are rivers, lakes and seas.
While many of these liquids are hydrocarbons—think entire oceans of methane—scientists believe oceans of water may lie beneath the moon’s frozen surface. This makes Titan a promising alien environment in the search for extraterrestrial life.
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Future data will also be captured by MIRI, a mid-infrared web tool. MIRI will reveal more of Titan’s spectrum; The instrument’s images are notable for the bursts of color from the stars, which Webb’s team calls “pins” in the sky.
Titan’s composition is so intriguing and mysterious that NASA plans to send a probe there in the mid-2030s. Dragonfly’s 3-foot spinner will travel billions of miles to the Moon. It will look for biosignatures and measure the chemical composition of Titan using 11 instruments.
This isn’t the first time humans have placed spacecraft on Titan. In 2005, the Huygens probe came to the surface and even take a picture before it gets dark. It offers a very limited view of this strange and distant world.
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