A Radar View of Titan
Where are Titan's craters?
Throughout our Solar System's five billion-year history,
dangerous rocks and
chunks of ice have
continually slammed into planets and moons -
usually creating numerous long lasting
impact craters.
When the robot spacecraft Cassini swooped past
Saturn's moon
Titan
last month, however,
radar images showed few craters.
One such image, spanning 75 kilometers across, is
shown above.
The imaged structures are not yet understood, but may involve some sort of
flows.
Titan is already known to be an unusual moon, sporting a
thick atmosphere, large size,
small amounts of
organic compounds.
Craters are surely created on all surfaces in the Solar System,
but might be destroyed later, as on
Earth and Jupiter's moon
Io.
How craters
are destroyed on Titan remains a topic of speculation,
but might become better understood by consideration of data returned by
future flybys of Cassini and by the
probe Huygens that will descend toward
Titan's surface in December.