Titan

What kind of landscape lies below the layers of clouds? What mysteries are held beneath these orange curtains? These questions will have to wait until future spacecraft are launched to visit this unusual moon. On October 15, 1997, the Cassini spacecraft was launched for a rendezvous with Saturn in June 2004. Later that year, it will release the European-built Huygens probe for a descent through Titan's atmosphere. Cassini will have more than 30 encounters with Titan, mapping the moon's surface with a synthetic aperature radar similar to the one Magellan used to map Venus. .
             Titan Statistics.
             Discovered by Christiaan Huygens .
             Date of discovery 1655 .
             Mass (kg) 1.35e+23 .
             Mass (Earth = 1) 2.2590e-02 .
             Equatorial radius (km) 2,575 .
             Equatorial radius (Earth = 1) 4.0373e-01 .
             Mean density (gm/cm^3) 1.88 .
             Mean distance from Saturn (km) 1,221,850 .
             Rotational period (days) 15.94542 .
             Orbital period (days) 15.94542 .
             Mean orbital velocity (km/sec) 5.58 .
             Orbital eccentricity 0.0292 .
             Orbital inclination (degrees) 0.33 .
             Escape velocity (km/sec) 2.65 .
             Visual geometric albedo 0.21 .
             Magnitude (Vo) 8.28 .
             Mean surface temperature -178°C .
             Atmospheric pressure (bars) 1.5 .
             Scientists for the first time have made images of the surface of Saturn's giant, haze-shrouded moon, Titan. They mapped light and dark features over the surface of the satellite during nearly a complete 16-day rotation. One prominent bright area they discovered is a surface feature 2,500 miles across, about the size of the continent of Australia. .
             Titan, larger than Mercury and slightly smaller than Mars, is the only body in the solar system, other than Earth, that may have oceans and rainfall on its surface, albeit oceans and rain of ethane-methane rather than water. Scientists suspect that Titan's present environment -- although colder than minus 289 degrees Fahrenheit, so cold that water ice would be as hard as granite -- might be similar to that on Earth billions of years ago, before life began pumping oxygen into the atmosphere.