Looking like the flowing designs carved by a Zen gardener’s rake, long parallel dunes of hydrocarbon sand stretch across the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The image above, acquired by Cassini in July 2013, reveals these intriguing and remarkably Earthlike landforms in unprecedented detail via radar, which can easily pierce through Titan’s thick clouds.
I’m feeling a little more enlightened already.
Although it piles into dunes like sand does here, Titan’s sand is not the same as what you’d find on a beach here on Earth. According to an ESA “Space in Images” article:
While our sand is composed of silicates, the ‘sand’ of these alien dunes is formed from grains of organic materials about the same size as particles of our beach sand. The small size and smoothness of these grains means that the flowing lines carved into the dunes show up as dark to the human eye.
Radar imaging, although capable of seeing through Titan’s opaque orange atmosphere, doesn’t capture visible-light images. Instead it’s sensitive to the varying textures of a landscape as they reflect microwaves; the smoother an object or an area is the darker it appears to radar, while irregular, rugged terrain shows up radar-bright.
The pixelated “seam” cutting horizontally across the center is the result of image artifacting.
Learn more about Cassini’s RADAR instrument here, and read more about this image on the ESA site here.
That’s remarkable. Sometimes the similarities with Earth are as striking as the differences.
Precisely what fascinates me as well. If NASA wasn’t so obsessed with finding life in places where there obviously is none, they would be talking of sending a dedicated probe to Titan instead of Europa. The solar system is fascinating already -we don’t need the lame “there might be life” excuse to explore it.
How do you know there’s “obviously” no life on Europa?
Besides which, we have already had a dedicated probe for Saturn’s moons. Time for Jupiter’s to get a turn as well.
Any idea what size area that image represents?