Saturn's moon Titan has dunes.
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Saturn's moon Titan has huge regions covered with dunes, possibly made out of ice crystals, sand or some other unknown material, international space scientists reported on Thursday.
Images of Titan beamed back to Earth from the joint U.S.-European Cassini mission look very much like sand dunes in the Sahara desert, Namibia, Saudi Arabia and Australia, the researchers said.
'It's bizarre,' said Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona, who worked on the study.
'These images from a moon of Saturn look just like radar images of Namibia or Arabia. Titan's atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, its gravity is lower, its sand is certainly different -- everything is different except for the physical process that forms the dunes and resulting landscape.'
The Cassini craft was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004 after an interplanetary cruise that took it past Venus and Jupiter.
Saturn's moon Titan has huge regions covered with dunes, possibly made out of ice crystals, sand or some other unknown material, international space scientists reported on Thursday.Images of Titan beamed back to Earth from the joint U.S.-European Cassini mission look very much like sand dunes in the Sahara desert, Namibia, Saudi Arabia and Australia, the researchers said.
'It's bizarre,' said Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona, who worked on the study.
'These images from a moon of Saturn look just like radar images of Namibia or Arabia. Titan's atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, its gravity is lower, its sand is certainly different -- everything is different except for the physical process that forms the dunes and resulting landscape.'
The Cassini craft was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004 after an interplanetary cruise that took it past Venus and Jupiter.
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