Titan Unveiled: Saturn's Mysterious Moon Explored

This beautifully illustrated volume reveals the startling discoveries about Saturn’s largest moon made by the Cassini-Huygens probe in 2005.

In the early 1980s, when the two Voyager spacecraft skimmed past Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, they transmitted back enticing images of a world concealed in a seemingly impenetrable orange haze. Scientists speculated about its mysteries for years. Finally, in 2005, the Cassini-Huygens probe successfully parachuted down through Titan’s atmosphere, all the while transmitting images and data. In Titan Unveiled, Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton take readers behind the scenes of this mission and everything it allowed us to see and discover.

Launched in 1997, Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in summer 2004. Its formidable payload included the Huygens probe. When the probe began transmitting images and data back to Earth, scientists were startled by what they saw. One of those researchers was Lorenz, who gives an insider’s account of the scientific community’s first close encounter with an alien landscape of liquid methane seas and turbulent orange skies.

Amid the challenges and frayed nerves, new discoveries are made, including methane monsoons, equatorial sand seas, and Titan’s polar hood. Lorenz and Mitton describe Titan as a world strikingly like Earth and tell how Titan may hold clues to the origins of life on our own planet—and possibly to its presence on others.

Generously illustrated, Titan Unveiled is essential reading for anyone interested in space exploration. A new afterword brings readers up to date on Cassini’s ongoing exploration of Titan, describing the many new discoveries made since 2006.

© 2010 Princeton University Press (E-raamat): 9781400834754

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E-raamat: 1. juuli 2010