Saturn moon ‘like Canada’

Eh? Maybe we should change the name from Titan to “Can-a-dia“. . .

Dr Ralph Lorenz, a mission scientist based at the University of Arizona in Tucson, yesterday described what he expected Huygens to encounter.

Despite the Saturn moon being such an alien world, its physical appearance was likely to be similar to parts of the Earth, he said.

He told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle: “I think we’ll see a rugged, but muted landscape. I think we’ll see a lot of impact craters.

“Impact cratering occurs everywhere in the solar system and on Titan, being a fairly sluggish environment, erosion is fairly slow. A lot of these will be filled with liquid to form circular lakes, rim-shaped lakes, bullseye lakes and horseshoe lakes. So I think we’ll see something maybe a bit like Sweden or northern Canada.”

Something else the article says is that Titan has an atmosphere four times denser than Earth. Amazing, I never knew that.