New! Sign up for our free email newsletter.
Reference Terms
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Titan (moon)

Titan, or Saturn VI, is the largest moon of Saturn and the second largest moon in the solar system, after Jupiter's moon Ganymede. It is roughly 50% larger than Earth's moon by diameter, and is larger by diameter and mass than all known dwarf planets. It is also larger by diameter than the planet Mercury, though Mercury is more than twice as massive.

Titan is the only moon in our solar system to have a dense atmosphere. The atmosphere is 98.4% nitrogen. Until very recently, this atmosphere inhibited understanding of Titan's surface, but the moon is currently undergoing study by the Cassini-Huygens mission, and new information about it is accumulating. On July 27, 2006, NASA confirmed the presence of hydrocarbon lakes in Titan's north polar region. At the surface, Titan's temperature is about 94 K.

Related Stories
 


Space & Time News

November 4, 2026

NASA is exploring a daring plan to save the legendary Hubble Space Telescope from its eventual fiery plunge into Earth's atmosphere. After more than 35 years of groundbreaking discoveries, Hubble is slowly losing altitude, and without intervention, ...
Europe’s Hera spacecraft has captured its first clear view of two asteroids involved in NASA’s historic 2022 experiment to redirect a potentially dangerous space rock. Now approaching the pair, Hera will investigate the mysterious aftermath of ...
NASA’s Voyager 1 is approaching an extraordinary milestone nearly 50 years after its launch, even as engineers battle dwindling power and mysterious technical problems. A clever energy-saving maneuver has extended the spacecraft’s scientific ...
Mysterious particles called neutrinos constantly stream through our bodies, and scientists are now detecting incredibly powerful versions arriving from distant cosmic sources using a massive ...
NASA’s Perseverance rover has set a historic record by traveling 28.10 miles across Mars, farther than any vehicle has ever driven on another world. Armed with groundbreaking autonomous navigation ...
NASA’s Artemis I mission has revealed that cosmic radiation near the Moon is higher than in Earth orbit, but not by as much as scientists might expect. Tiny experimental detectors also uncovered ...
Scientists have cracked a 178-year-old mystery surrounding a train delayed by a solar storm, revealing that the famous incident happened in 1848 rather than 1841. The discovery rewrites the early history of space weather and highlights a threat that ...
A new study tracking 13 astronauts suggests that the human heart may be surprisingly well equipped for a journey to Mars, especially with regular exercise during spaceflight. Researchers found that astronauts' hearts adapted to months of ...
NASA’s Perseverance rover has shattered a historic space exploration record, traveling farther across another world than any vehicle before it. Its advanced self-driving system helped it surpass ...
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has exceeded expectations after engineers made incredibly tiny adjustments to sharpen its view of the universe. By moving a mirror just one-sixteenth the width of a human hair, the team helped bring its ...
SpaceX just delivered some surprisingly strange cargo to the International Space Station, including tiny brain models, 3D heart tissue, and technology for making artificial retinas in space. ...
Europe's Sentinel-3C satellite has returned breathtaking images of Earth just two weeks after launch, revealing the snowy Alps, frozen Arctic islands, and brilliant turquoise Caribbean waters. Its ...

Latest Headlines

updated 12:56 pm ET