LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Titan (Moon): Surface
built 222 days ago
An alternate explanation for life's hypothetical existence on Titan has been proposed: if life were to be found on Titan, it would be statistically more likely to have originated from Earth than to have appeared independently, a process known as panspermia. It is theorized that large asteroid and cometary impacts on Earth's surface have caused hundreds of millions of fragments of microbe-laden rock to escape Earth's gravity. Calculations indicate that a number of these would encounter many of the bodies in the solar system, including Titan.[80][81]
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Shown here is a blowup of a region of Titan imaged on July 2, 2004. This image was taken at a distance of 339,000 kilometers (210,600 miles) and shows brightness variations on the surface of Titan and a bright field of clouds near the south pole. The field of clouds is 450 kilometers (280 miles) across and is the about the size of Arizona. Features as small as 10 kilometers (6 miles) can be discern.
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The above image was returned yesterday, January 14, 2005, by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during its successful descent to land on Titan. This is the colored view, following processing to add reflection spectra data, and gives a better indication of the actual color of the surface. Initially thought to be rocks or ice blocks, they are more pebble-sized. The two rock-like objects just below the middle of the image are about 15 centimeters (about 6 inches) (left) and 4 centimeters (about 1.5 inches) (center) across respectively, at a distance of about 85 centimeters (about 33 inches) from Huygens. The surface is darker than originally expected, consisting of a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice. There is ... evidence of erosion at the base of these objects, indicating possible fluvial activity. The image was taken with the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer, one of two NASA instruments on the probe.
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The atmosphere of Titan is made up of a thick haze, about 800 metres deep, of methane, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. This layer obscures the surface and makes it difficult to detect what lies below. Previous studies focused on a small range of wavelengths but spectral peaks that are characteristic of surface compounds only show up at a larger range of wavelengths.
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Since Titan's surface is obscured by clouds, this is a human first. As the image to the right shows, Titan looks an awful lot like Mars- only it's a lot colder and there's water.
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The July 1, 2004, photos of Titan from a distance of 210,000 miles seemed to show light-colored ice plateaus smeared with hydrocarbon tar. There ... seemed to be dark-colored ice plateaus. The light and dark areas seemed to be crashing into each other, which suggested a volatile surface of ice cracked by Titan-quakes.
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