Planetary surfaces

Decoding Titan landscapes with help from Earth and Mars

In exploring Saturn’s moon Titan, the Cassini mission revealed a surface with striking resemblances to Earth, including features formed by ponded and flowing liquid. The materials for landscapes on Titan – likely liquid hydrocarbons eroding and transporting material from an icy substrate – are markedly different from those on Earth. Yet familiar fluvial features occur at a range of scales, from rounded cobbles to drainage networks that can span hundreds of kilometers and empty into seas. An important caveat is that these inferences come largely from radar images that incompletely resolve the surface. Therefore, current data leave ambiguity about the processes that shape Titan’s surface, limiting our ability to reconstruct past landscape evolution and the modern hydroclimate. Together with collaborator Alex Hayes and his team at Cornell University, we are actively developing a new framework to tackle these ambiguities using a comparative planetary approach, leveraging the landscapes of Earth and Mars. This work is funded by the NASA Solar System Workings Program.