Scientist for a Day

NASA launched a mission in October 1997 to explore Saturn, named Cassini-Hyugens Mission. It reached the Saturnian system in July 2004 and worked till September 2017. It had a lander by the name of Hygens Probe which landed on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

Titan has icy lakes which makes it a little like Our Mother Earth but very adverse for living. If we talk about swimming in a Titan’s lake, it would be almost as a 200 kg. weight is added to your body when you are jumping in Titan’s lake. Your body will go down in the bottom of lake the very fast as the liquid in the lake would be almost like a colloidal solution and you would be having a feeling as a weight of a 200 kg. is fixed on your body in comparison to swimming in Earth’s lake.

Even then, it is proved that presence of liquid on Titan is very significant and the liquid of Titan’s lake is made of methane like colloidal solution. The NASA mission also discovered that there are 62 moons of Saturn orbiting close to planet, inside its magnificent ring and outside ring. Before the mission, humankind thought Saturn had about 32 moons.

Titan is still best to explore due to variety of reasons:

• It is the largest moon of Saturn.
• It has liquid lakes which makes it a bit similar to Earth.
• Its surface is hugely rough, more so than most of Saturn’s other moons.

In the future, if NASA plans to launch another mission to probe Saturn and its moons, I would suggest to go back to Titan. The new mission should have a way to move around and explore Titan for longer periods than the Huygens probe.

NASA has launched at least one mission to every planet and the Sun, but if NASA repeats its mission to Saturn I would request NASA to explore Titan more and more to find out the truth about this interesting moon."