ScienceDaily (Jan. 25, 2010) — Hills with a wrinkly radial pattern stand out in a new radar image of Saturn's moon Titan captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 28, 2009.

The grooved mounds in the picture, which are located in a northern hemisphere region known as Belet, are about 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide and about 60 meters (200 feet) high.

The shapes of these landscape features have not been seen on Titan before, though they bear similarity to spidery features known as coronae on Venus. A corona is a circular to elliptical feature thought to result from the flow of heat in a planet's interior.

Like forensic scientists, radar team members are trying to sleuth out what created these lines and hills on Titan.

"This star-shaped pattern of the hills indicates something significant happening in the middle of the star," said Steve Wall of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a Cassini scientist on the radar team. "It might be caused by tectonic forces, such as the forces that pull the crust of a planet apart, or rainfall that leads to erosion, or an ice intrusion like a dike."

All of these forces produce grooves on Earth's surface, but Wall says the radar team is not yet sure what is happening on Titan.

Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:

Other bookmarking and sharing tools:

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

enlarge

In this synthetic aperture radar image obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, two generally similar features, upper center and lower right, appear to be low mountains with grooves running roughly in the up-down direction. (Credit: NASA/JPL)

Related Stories

Cassini Gazes at Veiled Titan (Sep. 24, 2010) — NASA's Cassini spacecraft will swing high over Saturn's moon Titan on Friday, Sept. 24, taking a long, sustained look at the hazy moon. At closest approach, Cassini will fly within 8,175 kilometers ...  > read more

Putting It All Together On Saturn's Moon Titan (Aug. 9, 2011) — Three of the major surface features on Saturn's moon Titan -- dunes, craters and the enigmatic Xanadu -- appear in a new radar image from NASA's Cassini ...  > read more

Cassini to Make a Double Play (Dec. 12, 2011) — In an action-packed day and a half, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will be making its closest swoop over the surface of Saturn's moon Dione and scrutinizing the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest ...  > read more

Glint of Sunlight Confirms Liquid in Lake On Saturn's Moon Titan (Dec. 18, 2009) — NASA's Cassini Spacecraft has captured the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn's moon Titan, confirming the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, ...  > read more

Search ScienceDaily