Titan

Titan is the largest of the approximate 63 moons orbiting Saturn, it is also the second largest moon in the Solar System.

The Titan moon is 759 209.9 miles from the planet Saturn, which it orbits, and is 5150 miles in diameter.

Although Titan is classified as a moon it is larger than the planet Mercury.

Titan was discovered on March 25th 1655 by the Dutch astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens. After its discovery Huygens called it at first simply "Saturni Luna", (latin for Saturn's moon.)

The name of the mythological Titans comes from a term for the children of Uranus and Gaia. The Titans were known to have devoured the limbs of Dionysus, the son of Zeus. Zeus struck the Titans with lightning that burned the Titans to ashes, and from the ashes man was created.

Titan's atmosphere is primarily made up of nitrogen with other hydrocarbon elements which give moon its orange hue. These hydrocarbon rich elements are the building blocks for amino acids necessary for the formation of life.

Scientists believe that Titan's present atmosphere may be how Earth's was before oxygen was introduced into the atmosphere.

In 1980 NASA’s Voyager spacecraft tried to take close-up pictures of Titan, but due to the impenetrable thick cloud layers, it was only able to view color and light variations in the atmosphere.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in 1994 took pictures of Titan, and viewed what seemed to be huge bright "continent" that exists on the hemisphere that faces forward in orbit. This only proved that Titan has large bright and dark regions on its surface, and does not prove the possibility that liquid "seas" exist.

Since the launch of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft toward Saturn in 1997 to expanded our knowledge of Titan. During the primary and additional missions Cassini investigated the formation and intricate organic chemistry of Titan's thick, smog-filled atmosphere. During its lowest fly-by the Cassini spacecraft and its Huygens probe revealed immense methane lakes and widespread stretches of wind-sculpted sand dunes. Cassini researchers also deduced the presence of an internal, liquid water-ammonia ocean. The Cassini- Huygens spacecraft completed it’s initial mission in 2008 but due to these astounding discoveries the second mission has been extended to 2017.

The American aerospace engineer and author Robert Zubrin has stated "e;In certain ways, Titan is the most hospitable extraterrestrial world within our solar system for human colonization."e;