The probe which piggy-backed on NASA’s Cassini and landed on Titan last month, has beamed back images that throw new light on the satellite’s evolution.
The international Cassini team which conducted chemical tests based on Huygens’ findings reported Friday that despite extreme cold Titan’s system appears to be active and continues to evolve with methane as a key factor. The report was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
One of Huygens’ instruments which collected chemical data from Titan’s atmosphere indicate that its carbon has not escaped Titan’s atmosphere like the lighter of nitrogen’s two forms has.
What that suggests is the carbon in the methane is a relatively new arrival in the atmosphere, which in turn supports the hypothesis that Titan must be still active. Gas continues to be spewed out of Titan’s interior replacing the methane which is being broken apart in the atmosphere’s upper layers producing a smog-like layer.
The reason for this is theorized by the scientists as the main reservoir of oxygen, water which remains frozen due to the extreme minus 290 degree F temperatures on Titan.
Based on the chemical results, the team said they were surprised that no primordial gases were found on Titan’s ice. Gases such as argon, krypton and xenon were found to be lacking. The scientists are considering a number of working hypothesis to explain the lack of such gases. One scientist suggested the gases are stuck at the bottom of an ocean beneath Titan's frozen surface.
They're also not expecting to find life in any familiar form there. As "it's just much too cold out there.' said one scientist.
Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have its own atmosphere. The atmosphere is rich in nitrogen and contains about 6 percent methane. Titan’s atmosphere is believed to be 1 1/2 times thicker than Earth's.
Besides transporting Huygens, Cassini also played a key role in picking up the probe's transmission and relaying the telemetry to NASA, which then passed the data on to ESA.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA.
The images beamed by Cassini on its fly by have suggested that the planet-like moon is a diverse, exotic planet that was shaped by many different processes. Huygens transmitted just three and a half hours worth of data, so far. The bit of Titan land that the probe descended on was basically a mud puddle - a wet mixture of organic-rich material with liquid methane just below the surface.
So much more remains to be learnt about Titan. But the presence of liquid methane suggests some similarity with the early chemistry of Earth. Earth evolved because it was warmer. A member of the team suggested that by studying Titan’s atmosphere “we could be in fact looking at some of our own early history.”
