Picnic on Titan

摘要

Summertime is on its way. A thick smog hangs in the air. Storms are on the move, bringing rare rains to dry areas, and elsewhere lakes are shrinking. Only this is not Earth. This is the view on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, more than a billion kilometres away. We knew very little about this strange world before NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn seven years ago. Since then, the ringed planet has completed a quarter of an orbit around the sun and Titan has passed through its spring equinox. In that time, Cassini has swooped by Titan almost 80 times and has released the Huygens lander onto its surface. Together they have penetrated the haze that hides Titan's surface to reveal modest mountains, vast fields of sand dunes, rocks, and even streams, lakes and weather.