Celeste's Shenanigans

stellar-indulgence:

The combination of Titan’s low gravity and thick atmosphere would allow a human to fly by strapping “fake wings” to their arms.

The second-largest moon in the solar system, Saturn’s Titan is the only moon with a substantial atmosphere, which is much deeper than Earth’s. It’s so thick and the gravity so weak, in fact, that you could strap wings on your arms and flap them like a bird to fly. The air is mostly nitrogen, but the rest is mostly hydrocarbons, giving Titan’s atmosphere a thick orange smoggy haze that is opaque to visible light. Cassini studies Titan in infrared light (which can penetrate the haze) and with radar — and in 2004, via the Huygens Probe, an atmosphere probe became the first spacecraft to transmit from the surface of a moon other than our own. Titan is remarkably earthlike, apart from being so cold that water is as hard as rock; in addition to the atmosphere, it is the only place other than Earth known to have bodies of liquid on the surface — lakes as large as the Great Lakes, except that it’s not water: it’s probably methane or ethane. The climate is probably similar to some of our deserts, with gigantic monsoons perhaps once a decade or more, and long droughts between. NASA scientists are working on a mission called Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) specifically to study the lakes of Titan.

Read the full text here: http://mentalfloss.com/ It’s Raining on Titan! Illustration Credit & Copyright: David A. Hardy (AstroArt)