While they pale in comparison to the likes of Everest or K2, NASA’s Cassini mission has found several peaks on Saturn’s moon Titan that are at least 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) tall, including a 10,948 foot (3,337 meter) mountain located in a ridge known as the Mithrim Montes.
As the US space agency announced at the 47th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas on Wednesday, they were able to use the spacecraft’s radar to measure the peaks and observe several other geological features hidden beneath the hazy atmosphere.
Most of Titan’s tallest mountains are located near the moon’s equator, the researchers said, and while there are other large features on the surface, the nearly 11,000 foot tall Titan Mons is “the highest point we’re likely to find,” Cassini radar team deputy lead Stephen Wall of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
Other mountains of similar heights were also found in the Mithrim Montes, as well as in the region known as Xanadu, and a stretch of more isolated peaks called “ridge belts” located near the landing site of the European Space Agency’s Huygens spacecraft, the agency added.
What could have caused these peaks to form (and can we climb them)?
The discovery of Titan Mons and the other peaks on Titan’s surface was the result of the search for active zones, regions where dynamic forces helped shape its terrain, within the moon’s crust. Finding the highest and lowest features on the surface can reveal “important things about forces affecting [Titan’s] evolution,” said Cassini radar team associate Jani Radebaugh.
For instance, the fact that the moon has such relatively tall mountains would appear to indicate that the surface is being affected by some kind of active tectonic forces, possibly those related to the satellite’s rotation or tidal forces from Saturn, NASA explained. Now it is up to the research team to discover exactly what would cause tall mountains to form on an icy, oceanic moon.
“There is lot of value in examining the topography of Titan in a broad, global sense, since it tells us about forces acting on the surface from below as well as above,” said Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University who led the research. The work could also offer a glimpse into what our planet might have look life before life emerged, said Discovery News.
Titan, the website explained, is often referred to as a “young Earth analog,” which means that it mirrors early conditions on our world, despite the fact that it is smaller and farther away from the sun. Many of the processes that occur in Titan’s atmosphere mirror those that take place on Earth and the moon even has a methane cycle that is known to produce precipitation.
Of course, the discovery of 10,000 foot tall mountains on Titan inevitably leads to one important question: could we someday climb them? On the plus side, Titan Mons is 2.5 times smaller than Everest, and as Discovery News pointed out, the lower gravity (just 14 percent of that found here on Earth) would help matters. Unfortunately, the cold, toxic atmosphere would force a climber to make the trek in a spacesuit, which undoubtedly would raise the degree of difficulty.
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Image credit: NASA JPL
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