Titan’s atmosphere, like Earth’s atmosphere, interacts with the world’s surface. In a new paper appearing in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Anezina Solomonidou and collaborators analyzed mosaics of an image obtained by the Cassini mission. 

These infrared and visible light images were able to peer through Titan’s clouds to see the craters that pockmark its surface. Since craters can be found at every latitude on Titan, they allow scientists to study how storms and other atmospheric interactions act differently in different places. We see this on Earth where dust storms cover roads in sand in mid-latitudes, while snow will coat roads in polar latitudes, and rains will simply remove roads where the conditions are right. 

According to co-author Catherine Neish: Titan has weather. It’s not unlike the  Earth in that way. It’s just that the ingredients are all wrong. It has methane rain and streams cutting through the surface and organic sand getting blown around. It’s still very active just like it is here on Earth.

According to the NASA press release: Some of the new results reinforce what scientists knew about the craters – that the mixture of organic material and water ice is created by the heat of impact, and those surfaces are then washed by methane rain. But while researchers found that the cleaning process is happening in the midlatitude plains, they discovered that it’s not happening in the equatorial region; instead, those impact areas are quickly covered by a thin layer of sand sediment.

Solomonidou explains: The most exciting part of our results is that we found evidence of Titan’s dynamic surface hidden in the craters, which has allowed us to infer one of the most complete stories of Titan’s surface evolution scenario to date. Our analysis offers more evidence that Titan remains a dynamic world in the present day.

Dragonfly is planned to launch in 2027, and I think all of us would like a fast forward button to see what it will see.

More Information

NASA JPL press release 

Western University press release 

“The Chemical Composition of Impact Craters on Titan. I. Implications for Exogenic Processing,” A. Solomonidou, C. Neish et al., 2020 Sep. 1, Astronomy & Astrophysics