Sunday, October 30, 2005

Titan Mysteries Slowly--Very Slowly--Revealed

Titan has an atmosphere, unlike any other moon in our Solar System. It's atmospheric pressure is only one-and-a-half times as great as it is on Earth, but the hydrocarbon and carcinogenic orange-colored haze is thick as pea soup. Scientists believe they have even found a cloud covered, methane-filled lake.
Understanding why this happened there and no place else, is helping us better understand how the Solar System itself was formed. Analyzing all the data received so far from Huygens and Cassini will take years, and there's more data coming.
And in the meantime, mysterious convective cloud bands, liquid natural-gas rainfall and ice-volcanoes, are giving us all something to say "wow" about.

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