Titan's Atmosphere

An overview of Titan’s atmosphere.

Titan, the second largest moon of the Solar system was nothing more than a regular moon until Gerard Kuiper had a closer look at Titan’s spectral lines. When Kuiper discovered the presence of methane around Titan, he proved the existence of an atmosphere around Titan. Since Voyager’s flyby of Titan in the 1980s, researchers are finally able to see and learn more about Titan’s atmosphere and Cassini’s flybys give us an incredible amount of data about Titan. We live in a very interesting time for Titan research, and new research gives us more and more information on this moon with an early Earth-like atmosphere. Learning more about the formation and evolution of Titan’s atmosphere will help us significantly improve the models of the development of Earth’s atmosphere. This will be very important in the search for extra-terrestrial planets. And more importantly, it will help us answer the ultimate question in life. Are we alone? If not, where can we find life. Knowing how life developed on Earth will help us develop ways and theories about how life might have started on other planets. A key ingredient of the habitability criteria is an atmosphere. In this paper, I will have a closer look at Titan’s atmosphere. From the detection to the composition and the current processes that make Titan’s atmosphere so special in the Solar system.

By Olivier Go

6236847

University of Amsterdam

1 July 2013

The History of Titan

When in 1608, Hans Lippershey put a convex lens in front of a concave eyepiece, he had no idea how he had just revolutionized the field of Astronomy. Within a year of this scientific breakthrough, Galileo had designed his own telescope and discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter. After these first discoveries, telescope technology improved remarkably, and in1655, Christiaan Huygens developed a telescope that had a lens diameter of only 57 mm. Compared to the largest Earth-based telescopes of today, which have...