
April 22, 2010
Feature Story
Counting Titan’s Craters
NASA’s Cassini mission has been returning invaluable data for astrobiologists since its arrival at Saturn in 2004, and the discoveries just keep coming. Cassini images of Saturn’s moon Titan are now helping scientists from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona determine the moon’s age and physical properties. Titan is thought to be too cold to support life as we know it, but in some ways the moon is remarkably similar to Earth. Some scientists believe the atmospheric composition of Titan might be similar to that of the early Earth, and could thereby teach us about the conditions that allowed for the origin of life on our planet.