NASA's Cassini spacecraft has spotted the largest peak ever recorded on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Images collected from Cassini's radar instrument showed the mountain towers 10,948 feet above the surface of the giant moon, making it slightly smaller than Oregon's Mount Hood. This peak was found within a trio of mountainous ridges called the Mithrim Montes.
Titan is one of the largest moons in the solar system, complete with the densest atmosphere of any satellite in the solar system. Cassini's radar instrument, however, is able to peer through Titan's thick smog, revealing the landscape of the giant moon in great detail.
"It's not only the highest point we've found so far on Titan, but we think it's the highest point we're likely to find," explained Stephen Wall, deputy lead of the Cassini radar team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Cassini also revealed that Titan's highest peaks are located close to the equator and about 10,000 feet in elevation. Peaks of similar height were also found within the Mithrim Montes, as well as in the rugged region known as Xanadu, and in collections of more isolated peaks called "ridge belts," which are located near the landing site of ESA's Huygens probe.
"As explorers, we're motivated to find the highest or deepest places, partly because it's exciting. But Titan's extremes also tell us important things about forces affecting its evolution," said Jani Radebaugh, a Cassini radar team associate at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who led the research.
On Earth, mountains and cliffs, such as the Himalaya and Andes Mountains, are found in locations where the surface has been forced upward from underneath. Then, throught processes of erosion - wind, rain and runoff, for example - these land features are slowly worn down over time.
Similarly, Cassini data revealed that Titan also has rain and rivers that erode its landscape. However, this process is believed to be much slower on Titan than on Earth, as the giant moon is about 10 times Earth's distance from the sun. In other words, there is less energy to power erosive processes in the moon's atmosphere.
Furthermore, Titan's icy crust sits atop a deep ocean of liquid water, which acts much like Earth's upper mantle, researchers say. It follows then that the discovery of significant mountains on Titan's surface suggests that there must be some active tectonic forces underlying the moon's surface. In the future, researchers hope to learn more about what could produce such tall peaks on an icy ocean world.
"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," Radebaugh concluded.
The data collected by Cassini's radar instrument will be presented at the 47th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at The Woodlands, Texas.
