The Webb Space Telescope captured images of Saturn’s moon Titan last month, which have now been released for your viewing pleasure. The images provide a detailed, up-to-date look at the composition of Titan’s atmosphere and even the elements on its strange surface.
The telescope’s NIRCam instrument, which takes images in the near infrared range, captured the images. Clouds appear in Titan’s atmosphere (eccentrically labeled A and B in the annotated images), but also a hazy appearance over Kraken Mare, which is thought to be a sea of methane, as well as dark sand dunes.
More Titan data is expected from Webb’s instruments – including NIRSpec, which can assess the planet’s chemical composition, such as Already with distant exoplanetsMay or June 2023.
Titan is about 50% wider than Earth’s moon. It is the only moon in the solar system with a large atmosphere (which is dominated by nitrogen) and a place next to the ground It is known that there are rivers, lakes and seas.
Although many of these liquid bodies are hydrocarbons—imagine entire oceans of methane—scientists think oceans of water may lie beneath the moon’s icy surface. This makes Titan a promising alien environment in the search for life beyond Earth.
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Future data will also be collected by MIRI, an infrared web tool. MIRI will reveal more of Titan’s spectrum; The machine’s images are distinguished by stellar splashes of color, what Webb’s team calls a “skittle” in the sky.
Titan’s make-up is so exciting and mysterious that NASA plans to send a probe there in the mid-2030s. The 3-foot spinner Dragonfly will make the billion-mile journey to the moon. It will look for biosignatures and measure the chemical composition of Titan using an array of 11 instruments.
This wouldn’t be the first time humans have put a spacecraft on Titan. In 2005, the Huygens probe descended to the surface and even take a picture before dark. It offers a disturbingly limited view of this strange and distant world.
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