Just the same terrestrial landscapes every now and then photograph the American interplanetary station Cassini, located near Saturn
Near the North Pole of Titan, a satellite of this planet, almost the size of our moon, scientists have made out many large lakes connected by channels. The smooth surface of some stretched for more than a hundred kilometers. And you can see that something is flowing in the channels. The area is very similar to Karelia, Finland or Canada.
"Karelian" lakes of Titan
And in other areas of Titan, deserts were discovered. In the pictures, they showed themselves as dunes - sandy embankments with a height of under 100 meters, a width of 1-2 kilometers, which stretch for hundreds of kilometers.
Dunes: left on Titan, right on Earth
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NASA scientists, who examined the images transmitted by Cassini back in 2005 and 2007, assure that the dunes in the area called Fensal are very similar to those on Earth - just like in the Kalahari Desert. And in the Belet area, they remind us of the Rub al-Khali desert in Oman.
The higher the dunes of Titan are, the thinner they are, the researchers note. The deserts here are very vast - they occupy millions of square kilometers.
"Sand", "water" and "stones"
Titanic pictures are, of course, amazing. As if they were not photographed on another planet. But there is still a fundamental difference with earthly landscapes. The moon of Saturn is a world "shifted in temperature" relative to ours by 100, and in some places by 200 degrees in minus. Therefore, in rivers and lakes - by no means water. And in the dunes - not sand at all. That is, not silicate grains.
“Liquid hydrocarbons flow through Titan - a mixture of methane and ethane,” says one of the research leaders Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona. - They also fill the lakes.
Recently it was possible to clarify: in titanium liquid there are almost 80 percent ethane, about 10 percent methane and about 8 percent propane. The rest is butene, butane and acetylene. Which is also liquefied natural gas. It seems that the largest reserves in the solar system are concentrated on Titan. Such that no Gazprom dreamed of. But where they came from is not known.
At one time, Cassini also transmitted pictures of rivers, the meandering channels of which cut through the equatorial continent called Xanadu.
To suggest what the sand of Titan is made of, images of the Huygens probe, which separated from Cassini, landed on Titan and photographed directly on the surface of Saturn's moon, allow. There are pebbles and boulders in the frame - a lot of rounded stones. Some were up to two meters in diameter. Their surface was smoothly polished.
Pebbles: Left on Titan, Right on Earth
Now scientists are more and more inclined to believe that pebbles and boulders were formed in the same way as on Earth. The stones were rolled in. Run in with the same liquid that is on Titan. Some of the stones and pebbles, most likely, consist of real water with admixtures of ammonia. That is, they are icy. When the temperature on Titan's surface is minus 180 degrees Celsius, the ice becomes very strong. However, the origin of the local water frozen into the rocks remains mysterious.
It seems that from the "stones" the "sand" was formed, filling the local deserts. But according to another hypothesis, grains of sand are frozen hydrocarbons that fall out of the atmosphere.
Is there life in the cold?
Scientists have repeatedly stressed: the external resemblance of Titan to Earth is amazing. Indeed, in addition to continents, seas, rivers and lakes, the satellite has an atmosphere, clouds, fog. It rains there. The weather is changing. And the fluid cycle is similar to that of the earth. And even molecules have been discovered that resemble amino acids, of which the proteins of terrestrial organisms are built. But is there life on Titan?
Biologists answer evasively: we do not yet know creatures capable of metabolism at temperatures of minus 180 degrees Celsius.
He's the only one
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn. Among the satellites in the solar system, it is second in size only to Ganymede, the satellite of Jupiter. Titan is larger than Mercury. And almost twice as heavy as our moon. It is located about 3 times further from Saturn than the Moon from Earth. Therefore, it looks in the Saturian sky as a disk half the size of the moon.
Titan is the only satellite in the solar system that has a dense atmosphere.