Titanic Exploration

Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons - roughly half our earth’s size - has long orbited the debate of planetary colonization. It is the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere - one that actually rotates faster than its surface - and this atmosphere is nitrogen dense. Titan receives about 1% the sunlight of our native globe, and its average surface temperature is about -180 °C. Satellite images show cryovolcanoes that pepper the moon’s surface, erupting with methane or ice. Imaging also shows us extensive longitudinal dunes, tens of hundreds of kilometers long.

The Huygens probe - named after the first scientist to discover the moon in 1655, Christaan Huyens - landed on Titan in 2005 to document this far-out habitat. To this date, Titan is the most distant planetary or lunar body that NASA has landed a space probe on. The probe captured photographic evidence of seas of methane, hills - or highlands - of water-based ice, and as rivers of darker organic material and methane from the upper atmosphere and precipitation.

By Earth standards, Titan appears far from hospitable for human life - but against the vast emptiness and harshness of space, it has a lot to offer fairly close to home. Scientists predict that Titan could become “far more” habitable within five billion earth years, due to the expansion of our sun. Such an increase in temperature could melt the water-based ice, and support more earth-traditional water-based life growth for a span of seven million earth years.

While five billion earth years is a practically inconceivable amount of time for us, exploration of Saturn’s most alluring moon isn’t necessarily bound to the terrain’s hospitality. Theoretically, “the same kind of light that drives biological chemistry on Earth's surface could also drive chemistry on Titan, even though Titan receives far less light from the sun and is much colder. Titan is not a sleeping giant in the lower atmosphere, but at least half awake in its chemical activity" (space.com).

Because the chemical possibility for life does exist, Titan should not be ruled out for further exploration. Although after my limited and amateur research I do not feel that Titan presents cause for "a space mission" proposal, as this assignment calls for, the moon did present enough intrigue to warrant this miniature investigation. As for an eye to sustainability - perhaps we need to expand our sights to economic rationales. Are cryovolcanoes the new cryotherapy? Is Titan a potential tourist destination for centuries future?

350 Earth years separate Huyens' Titanic discovery from our probe's mission, and technology makes possible the idea that another 350 years will see a more directly human expedition of the moon - in fact, it would seem almost impossible for us not to at least have done a fly-by. Colonization? Maybe. Give me a few centuries.

More info:

• http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/index.cfm?SciencePageID=73
• http://www.space.com/15257-titan-saturn-largest-moon-facts-discovery-sdcmp.html
• http://astronomynow.com/2015/03/01/life-not-as-we-know-it-possible-on-saturns-moon-titan/
• https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/spacecraft/huygens.html#.VuowzzYrLsk
• http://news.softpedia.com/news/Titan-s-Surface-Is-Soft-and-Dusty-Huygens-Probe-Landing-Data-Shows-299004.shtml