A Space Trip: Saturn’s Titan, the Moon & the Routines of Life
Audio: Extract from “Disrupting the Routines of Life”, Chap.8 in “Journey to Ixtlan” by Carlos Castaneda.
Video: Compilation of footage from the joint ESA’s/NASA’s robotic space mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, and the still earlier human exploration of the Moon by US astronauts during the Appolo missions, 1969-1972.
What is Titan? It’s a big moon with an atmosphere, and is totally unhospitable to humans, trees, and any form of complex life forms. We don’t know yet, but there could be some form of microbial life present, now or in the past. The air on Titan is unbreathable. It has no oxygen in it (Earth air contains 21% oxygen). It is made predominantly of nitrogen, 95% (Earth air contains 78% nitrogen), and 5% methane (which is a natural gas used for cooking and heating).
The light is very dim on Titan, like at dusk. Because the air is so thick you wouldn’t be able to see the sun at all, just a dark dirty orangy haze. A bit like that famous Sydney dust storm in 2009.
The air pressure at the surface is stronger than it is on Earth, about 160% of ours. This air pressure (1.6 atm) is equivalent to the pressure of water in the depth of 6 meters. You can get a good idea of this pressure if you dive as far as you can.
So not only is the air there unbreathable, incredibly cold, and terribly oppressive to the ears and eyes, but everything is much lighter! A 10 L bucket of water weighs only a bit over 1 kilogram on Titan – frozen stiff, that is.
Its day lasts more than 2 weeks – 16 full earth days, in fact. Titan keeps the same side turned towards its mother planet Saturn, around which it rotates also in 16 days. It is 3 times farther away from Saturn (1.2 million kms) than is our own Moon from the Earth.
A very cold and a very dimly lit place. The surface temperature is minus 178 degrees Centigrade, compared to the chilling minus 89 degrees Centigrade in Antarctica.
How far is it to get there? The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, being as heavy as 5 motorcars at launching (6 tons), took 7 full years (1997- 2004) to make the 1.4 billion km journey. Remember, this place is 10 times further away from us than is our own Sun.
The spacecraft’s travelling speed varied between 200 kms per hr and 2 200 kms per hour, being assisted on its way by the gravitational pull of various Solar System bodies.
The spacecraft is nuclear-powered and as such was considered a hazard in the event of it crashing back to earth if there was a technical malfunction in the early stage of its journey.
The lander Huygens is 1.3 meter across and weighs over 300 kilos. It descended to the surface of Titan by a parachute. You can see the parachute shadow in the vid as the probe lands. The descent through the thick atmosphere took 2.5 hrs, and the probe remained functional on the surface for over an hour (the target was only for a few minutes of on-the-ground operational capacity). It landed on a several centemeter thick crust, covering a softer ground underneath. On landing, the hot shell of the probe (heated by the prolonged friction with the atmosphere during its fall) vaporised the frozen methane and water it rested on – you can see this vapor in the vid.
To go around the whole moon is as far as from Australia to Greenland. There are low mountains and hills of water ice and rock, valleys, but no rivers. It rains not water but methane. And there are lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane.
Volcanism also seems to exist here. These cryovolcanoes, or cold volcanos, produce outfows of liquid water and ammonia.
The cost of this mission? US$ 3.2 billion. For comparison, in 2010 the Australian government is spending US$ 4.8 billion, the Iraq government US$ 4.3 billion, on education.
If anything, this place is rich in hydrocarbons, storing multiple quantities of what there ever was on earth.
The Cassini mission has been extended till 2017, provided the orbiter remains functional, finally to be plunged into Saturn for disposal. Partially, this is to avoid a potential contamination with Earth microorganisms if it were left to crash into one of the many moons of Saturn.
What about the Moon? Though similar in size to Titan, the Moon has no atmosphere, so you would not be able to hear even the loudest explosion there. It’s totally still, no wind, no air, no atmospheric pressure. So there is none of that oppressive feeling one would find on Titan either. And there is a lot of fine, graphite or chalk-like dust there, that tends to stick to everything.
But there is water on the Moon, huge amounts of water ice on the north pole, as recently confirmed by NASA and India’s Chandrayaan-I spacecraft.
This India’s first Moon mission cost the children of India US$ 90 million. This money is enough take 200,000 of them out of poverty for the duration of one year.
Note also that none of the 35 Indian cities with a population of more than one million has continuous water supply, as of 2010.
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