14 DAY TRIAL // A frozen Earth-like world is depicted by Cassini on Titan.
The international spacecraft spotted on Saturn's giant moon its largest mountain range to date, tall enough to produce streamers of hazy clouds that extend far around the moon.
The mountains are nearly a mile (1,600 m) high and stretch for nearly 100 miles (160 km). The surprised researchers re-analyzed the images to double-check to see if they were real and not shadows of other surface features.
Robert Brown, a Cassini scientist from the University of Arizona, said the mountains reminded him of California's Sierra Nevada range. "You could call this the Titan Sierras," said Robert Brown of the University of Arizona, alluding to California's Sierra Nevada range. The mountains probably emerged from the same process that occurs in the Earth's mid-ocean ridge.
Probably hot material beneath Titan's surface gushed up when tectonic plates pulled apart, creating the mountain range. Cassini turned its visual and infrared cameras on the moon during a close flyby on October 25. Several smaller ranges appear to be nearby, as does a circular feature that might be the crater from an ancient asteroid impact powerful enough to have punched through Titan's outer crust.
Brown thinks that the mountains might be a chain of volcanoes that oozed up along cracks in the crust after the impact. Scientists warn that there may be higher mountains on Titan. "It's an interesting find, but finding the highest so far may not mean a lot given that we haven't observed that much of Titan yet," Ralph Lorenz of Johns Hopkins University's Planetary Exploration Group said by email. "More interesting, Lorenz says, is the fact that the mountains are aligned north-south on a part of Titan that is always directly facing Saturn."
"That means that tidal forces from Saturn may have contributed to creating the cracks along which the range formed", he said.
These mountains are another remarkably Earth-like finding on a world that has already yielded lakes, streambeds, sand dunes, and a continent-size land mass named Xanadu. "You can think of Titan as like the Earth in Deep Freeze," said Rosaly Lopes of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's more Earthlike than anywhere else in the solar system, but the surface is very cold."
The summit of the range is capped with brilliant white layers that may be deposits of methane or another organic material. Cassini is funded by NASA and the European and Italian space agencies and was launched in 1997.