Titan: Earth-like on the Outside, Ocean World on the Inside
Abstract
Thanks to the Cassini-Huygens mission, Titan, the pale orange dot of Pioneer and Voyager encounters has been revealed to be a dynamic, hydrologically-shaped, organic-rich ocean world offering unparalleled opportunities to explore prebiotic chemistry. And while Cassini-Huygens revolutionized our understanding of each of the three layers of Titan--the atmosphere, the surface, and the interior--we are only beginning to hypothesize how these realms interact. In this paper, we summarize the current state of Titan knowledge and discuss how future exploration of Titan would address some of the next decade's most compelling planetary science questions. We also demonstrate why exploring Titan, both with and beyond the Dragonfly New Frontiers mission, is a necessary and complementary component of an Ocean Worlds Program that seeks to understand whether habitable environments exist elsewhere in our solar system.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2102.08472,
title = {Titan: Earth-like on the Outside, Ocean World on the Inside},
author = {Shannon M. MacKenzie and Samuel P. D. Birch and Sarah Horst and Christophe Sotin and Erika Barth and Juan M. Lora and Melissa G. Trainer and Paul Corlies and Michael J. Malaska and Ella Sciamma-O'Brien and Alexander E. Thelen and Elizabeth P. Turtle and Jani Radebaugh and Jennifer Hanley and Anezina Solomonidou and Claire Newman and Leonardo Regoli and Sebastien Rodriguez and Benoit Seignovert and Alexander G. Hayes and Baptiste Journaux and Jordan Steckloff and Delphine Nna-Mvondo and Thomas Cornet and Maureen Palmer and Rosaly M. C. Lopes and Sandrine Vinatier and Ralph Lorenz and Conor Nixon and Ellen Czaplinski and Jason W. Barnes and Ed Sittler and Andrew Coates},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.08472},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Submitted to the PSJ Focus Issue on Ocean World Exploration