Hows the Atmosphere of Titan’s Lakes
The most majestic of Saturn’s many moons and the most promising for life, too. It’s got a beautiful view and liquid lakes on its surface. The only problem is those lakes aren’t filled with water. They’re filled with liquid methane.
Your mission is to take a five-second dip in one of them. Of course, you’d have to land on Titan first. So buckle up for the most epic adventure of your lifetime. Getting to Titan Titan is far. Even at its closest to Earth, this icy moon is still 1.2 billion km (746 million mi) away from us. You’d be looking at roughly seven years of travel alone in a spaceship. You’d need lots of provisions and a super advanced life support system. You know, it would be good if you made it to Titan and didn’t freeze or suffocate somewhere in the middle of the Solar System.
Titan is unique in many ways for one, it’s larger than our Moon. It’s even bigger than Mercury, the smallest planet in our cosmic neighbourhood. It’s the only moon that has a thick atmosphere. It’s also the only one that’s covered in liquid lakes, rivers and seas and sometimes it rains here, too. Landing on Titan Descending on Titan would take you about two and a half hours. And you couldn’t just land anywhere. This moon of Saturn might look a lot like Venus, but it’s not as hellishly hot. Titan is one of the most hospitable places in the Solar System. Yeah, its gravity is only 14% of Earth’s, but its thicker atmosphere makes it possible for you to walk there, even without a spacesuit.
Titan is very far away from the Sun, so it doesn’t receive as much warmth as we do here on Earth. You’d be taking a brisk stroll at a chilling -180 °C (-290 °F). Well, you wouldn’t exactly be strolling. More like bouncing around. Yeah, thanks to Titan’s weaker gravity, you’d feel a lot lighter and could jump higher and move with less effort.
Titans Atmosphere
Titan’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, very similar to Earth’s. But you still couldn’t breathe on this moon because, well, that’s where the similarity ends. While 95% of the air here is nitrogen, the remaining 5% is methane. You need an oxygen tank to survive even 5 seconds on this world. Yeah, it’s not just the lakes that have methane in them. There’s plenty of methane in Titan’s clouds and sometimes it even rains methane. But this rain isn’t anything like you’ve seen on Earth. It would be more like rain in slow motion, thanks to Titan’s lower gravity and thick atmosphere. On Earth, raindrops fall at about 9 m/s (30 ft/s). But on Titan, their speed is only about 1.6 m/s (5 ft/s). That’s six times slower. It would be pretty cool to walk in the rain here.
