Titan
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I’ve done some cool things in my life. I’ve visited a country that doesn’t exist anymore (the Soviet Union). I’ve stepped into both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I’ve stood in front of the Sphinx at Giza and seen the aurora borealis. But as I’ve gotten older and my challenges have become, well, more challenging, my exploits are centered closer to home.
Like spying Titan from my front porch.
I’d borrowed a Celestron NexStar 127SLT from my astronomy club. (Full disclosure: I later bought the instrument from them during a library sale.) Jupiter was dazzling in the sky that night but was still tangled in the branches of the neighbor’s wild cherry tree to the east. The brightest light in the sky was Saturn, and I felt a thrill of excitement as I focused in on the planet’s famous rings. Then, in my eyepiece, I saw another tiny point of light nearby. My jaw literally dropped when I realized I was looking at Titan with my own eyes.
I can’t tell you precisely what it is about Titan that captivates me. I can tell you it’s the largest moon of the planet Saturn, and the second-largest moon in the solar system overall. Its orbital period is nearly 16 days at a radius of 1.2 million kilometers above its planet.
Maybe it’s the fact that Titan is the only (known) moon with an atmosphere—one that’s denser than our own. Maybe it’s because its name hearkens back to Greek mythology, which I studied as a child.
Or maybe it’s because we’ve actually seen its surface. It’s 1.5 billion kilometers from the Sun—and it takes 80 minutes for sunlight to reach that far—but we successfully landed the Huygens probe on its surface in 2005 and sent back data, including photos and sound.
See, that blows my mind.
Too many people glance at these images and shrug. Does the high production value of our sci-fi TV and movies make the “real thing” look boring in comparison? Have people gotten frustrated with the slow pace of space exploration? I don’t know. All I can say, “Are you f-ing kidding me?! That’s TITAN.”
I have similar reactions to images sent back to Earth from the aptly named Perseverance rover on Mars. We’re looking at an entirely different planet, without ever having to leave the ground ourselves.
At the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, a “long-out-of-print science fiction writer” named Kilgore Trout asks the narrator to choose two twinkling stars in the night sky, and then glance from one to the other—a distance, Trout says, that takes thousands or millions of years for light to traverse. Trout then speaks of what has just passed between those stars:
”Your awareness. … That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.”
There are days I struggle with seemingly basic tasks, when any kind of productive work is an impossibility and even making something halfway nutritious to eat is difficult. It’s easy to end up feeling rather useless, but chronic illness and pain haven’t (yet) robbed me of my sense of wonder, thank goodness. As much as I love the stars, I will never don a spacesuit or travel beyond my home planet’s atmosphere. But I have seen the surface of Titan.
To borrow again from Vonnegut: If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
Image: Scientists find ‘impossible’ cloud could be forming on Saturn’s moon Titan
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center