UA Space Grant Intern Mark Robertson-Tessi, along with mentor Ralph Lorenz, have been exploring Titan, Saturn's largest satellite. Specifically, Mark's internship has involved studying the landscape of Titan, then rendering images of what the landscape may look like. Below are a few of the images, along with detailed descriptions. Click on each image to view the full-size version.

2012 - Back to Titan. An autonomous airship exploits Titan's thick atmosphere and low gravity to explore the near-surface environment. The airship communicates direct-to-Earth with a large electronically-steered phased-array antenna. Here it uses its thruster fans to hold position in the gentle breeze that is whipping up waves in an ethane lake.Having profiled the depth of the lake with a ground-penetrating radar,the airship is acquiring surface material with a tethered sample acquisition device to analyze it for prebiotic compounds.

Alternate Reality. In this rendering, the Huygens probe (shape model derived from various sources) is about to splash down on the Saturn side of Titan, rather than on the antisaturn side we will actually visit. (In fact, Saturn's proximity to the horizon shows we are close to +/-80 degrees longitude : the orientation of the rings as near-vertical shows we are close to the equator. The sun's position relative to Saturn shows we are close to summer solstice, although from this image you can't tell north from south...) Titan's atmosphere really should be this transparent, at least at some wavelengths accessible to cameras, if not to the naked eye.

A scientifically-inspired artistic rendering of Titan's hypothesized landscape. Seen from a viewpoint 50km up, 

the planetary curvature of Titan (radius 2575km) is evident. A 60-km impact crater, to left, has an updomed floor and a central pit, as seen in craters of this size on the icy satellite Ganymede : On Titan, however, the crater has partially filled with black hydrocarbon liquids - methane and ethane. A few other craters and tectonic landforms litter the landscape, which is only weakly modified by erosion. Distant clouds hover at around 20km altitude.