"TITAN is shockingly Earth-like." So says planetary scientist Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, Texas, who has been amazed by data sent back by the Huygens probe, which landed on Titan earlier this month. "These could have been pictures from an alien probe landing along the Florida gulf coast."
Titan is turning out to be a world in which alien materials form eerily Earth-like landscapes, as misfit streams of methane flow through rugged hills of ice. Even the mud appears familiar.
By combining different views from Huygens's descent, the camera team led by Marty Tomasko of the University of Arizona has been able to produce 3D images of the moon's surface. They show a ridge system with a peak 100 metres high. "These are water-ice ridges washed off by rainfall," Tomasko says.
William McKinnon, an expert on the moons of the outer planets at Washington University in ...
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