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Space/Science » in reply to Titan encounter thread

re: Titan is so amazingly weird

Check out these images:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/titan/images/PIA06138.jpg


If you click through and look at the full-sized image -- paying particular attention to the one in the upper-right -- you'll see long, narrow, sinuous features which nevertheless manage to look exactly unlike rivers. They start and end in the middle of the "land"; they connect "seas" together; they have branching patterns exactly like you would expect a river not to. So what are they? (One thought which crossed my mind: how would hydrological surface features look in a high-wind, low-gravity environment where the working "fluid" was more like tar? I have no idea...)

I used to think that Titan was enigmatic when it was nothing more than a fuzzy orange sphere. Now I think it's really weird. It is definitely unlike anything else in the solar system. E.P. may go on about how Mars isn't Earth-like, but at least it has things that I can legitimately call hills, valleys, plains, rocks, et cetera. With Titan, everything is unrecognizable. I can't wait to see the radar data, because right now I'm boggled beyond belief.

Enjoying every minute of it,

Nathan.

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