Jordan Klos and Ananya Garg

Jordan Klos and Ananya Garg

Topic: Titania


Titania, discovered in 1787, is the largest satellite of Uranus’ 27 moons. Titania, meaning ‘giant, great one’ (in Greek), is named after a character in the Shakespearean play, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’. Titania’s core and surface (277m2/g) contains a myriad of captivating features such as its cryovolcanic tectonic plates and magnetic field, and possibility for life, which are culminating factors as to why a spacecraft should return to Titania.

Titania 312

Titania shows cryovolcanic evidence with its tectonic disruption, including planet-sized rifts. These rifts form grabens over 10,000km in area and 5km deep. Consequently, it’s anticipated for liquid water to be present between Titania’s rocky core and icy mantle. As Titania has a large volume of electrically conducting fluid, it can be dictated that it would resultingly have a strong magnetic field. Furthermore, with the possibility to detect Uranus’ magnetic field and differences in its strength, Titania could generate an electric current from the conducting liquid. This current would initiate an induced magnetic field, that would be detectable by a spacecraft.

In the search of habitable planets, scientists discovered the possibility that Titania may futuristically have signs of life. Due to Titania’s distance from the sun, solar radiation has been enabled and impacted the moon’s carbon cycle. The increased radiation has caused Titania’s polar regions to heat up and increase the satellite’s overall carbon dioxide. This affects Titania’s carbon cycle as the poles can reach up to -1880°c causing the carbon dioxide to sublimate and migrate to the equatorial regions, similar to the reverse of Earth’s hydrological cycle.

If a spacecraft were to visit Titania, they would detect the geologically active surface and a carbon cycle that could result in the possibility for life. Both of these factors would be valuable to explore if another spacecraft were to visit Titania.

You Might Also Like