Planet Saturn & Titan Moon | NASA Cassini Mission

Planet Saturn & Titan Moon | NASA Cassini Mission

NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived in the Saturn system in 2004 and ended its mission in 2017 by deliberately plunging into Saturn's atmosphere. This method was chosen because it is necessary to ensure protection and prevent biological contamination to any of the moons of Saturn thought to offer potential habitability. The Cassini Mission mapped more than 620,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers) of liquid lakes and seas on the surface of Saturn's largest moon Titan. This work was performed with its radar instrument that sent out radio waves and collected a return signal (or echo) that provided information about the terrain and the liquid bodies' depth and composition, along with two imaging systems that could penetrate the moon's thick atmospheric haze.

Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and is the second largest moon in our solar system. Titan is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere, and the only object in space, other than Earth, where clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found. Titan’s subsurface water could be a place to harbor life as we know it, while its surface lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons could conceivably harbor life that uses different chemistry than we are used to—that is, life as we do not yet know it. 

The Cassini-Huygens mission was a cooperative project of NASA, European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the U.S. and several European countries.

Cassini Mission information:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/cassini

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS

Processing: Kevin M. Gill

Image Date: August 11, 2013

Release Date: June 29, 2024

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