What Are The Straight Lines on Saturn’s Titan Moon?

Dark "channels," perhaps draining down into dark "methane sea" at bottom, in image taken from about 8 kilometers altitude by Huygens probe with a resolution of about 20 meters per pixel. Boundary between high, lighter-colored terrain and and darker lowland area on Titan resembles a coast line. One of the many mysteries: what is the right angle structure beneath the white arrow? This composite was produced from images returned January 14, 2005, by ESA's Huygens probe. Image source: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

May 6, 2005 Tucson, Arizona - This week planetary scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson submitted their first paper about the Cassini/Huygens probe images of Saturn's huge moon, Titan, to the British journal, Nature. But the article, with many images and hypotheses about what the surface geology might be on the mysterious moon, won't be released until the end of 2005. One of the many surface features that have provoked scientists to wonder what they are seeing is what appears to be a straight-sided 90-degree angle at the left of a composite image released on January 14, 2005, soon after the Huygens probe had descended from the Cassini spacecraft to land on Titan. This week I asked one of the team members studying Titan's surface images to comment on the "structure."

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