Thread by @weatherindia

#Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 82 confirmed moons and the second-largest in our Solar System, has multiple surface features similar to that of planet Earth, according to a new study by @NASA scientists.

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sc…

📸: NASA/JPL-Caltech

@NASA The findings indicate that the two worlds may have been the products of the same geologic processes. A team led by Rosaly Lopes, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, conducted a research to develop the first global geologic map of Titan.

The map was created using data from NASA's Cassini mission, which operated between 2004 and 2017 and performed more than 120 flybys of Titan. Cassini's radar imager penetrated Titan's opaque atmosphere of nitrogen and methane.

The results, acquired using combined instruments and datasets, revealed a dynamic world of dunes, lakes, plains, craters and other terrains - all of which appear to be distributed with latitude on a global scale. Some of these terrain features cover a greater area than others.

The complex geologic landscapes on Titan have been shaped by an active hydrologic cycle. In this cycle, hydrocarbons like methane and ethane play the same role as water does on Earth.

📸: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Therefore, despite the differences in temperatures and gravity fields between Earth and Titan, similar geologic processes have resulted in the two sharing similar surface features.

Organic materials like carbon-based compounds are a necessary fuel for life as we know it. The abundant presence of such organic carbons on this natural satellite, which is slightly larger than Mercury, has kept astronomers on their toes for decades.