Last week we talked about the idea of SpaceX's Starship flying to Europa and Enceladus, and
as if those moons weren't fascinating enough,
there is one moon that is even more fascinating.
We're of course talking about Saturn's moon
Titan. Why is this moon one of the most fascinating
places in the solar system, and why would
it be a perfect location for Starship to visit?
Well, as always I would say, let's find out!
The outer
solar system is a really fascinating place.
In the last friday episode, which you can
watch right here, we talked about the icy
moons of the outer solar system, specifically
Europa and Enceladus, which both have oceans
of liquid water underneath their surface,
where possibly even life could exist. And
while all these moons have either no atmospheres
at all, or at best extremely thin ones, there
is one moon in the outer solar system, that
just stands out extremely.
This moon of Saturn basically stands out from the rest
like a bodybuilder at a conference for theoretical
particle physics. We're talking about Titan
of course. Titan, while technically an icy
moon, is so different because it's the only
moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere.
And we are talking really really dense here.
The surface pressure on the surface of Titan
is an astonishing 146.7 kPa, so 1.45 atmospheric pressures of earth at sea level. The atmosphere
is composed mainly of nitrogen, with 98.4%,
the rest being methane and a bit of hydrogen.
Titan has a diameter of 5150 km, and is thus
the second largest moon in the solar system
after Ganymede, and larger than the planet
mercury. But fascinatingly, it is only 40%
as massive as Mercury, therefore the surface
gravity is surprisingly low, only 0.138 g or
83.5% moon gravity. This in itself is already
extremely interesting. Why? Because this combination
of very low gravity and high atmospheric pressure,
means, that we could fly on Titan. Yes, if
we would have wing-suits, we could just fly
around on Titan like birds, no joke. This
has been wonderfully visualized in the short
movie Wanderers by Erik Wernquist, link in
the description down below, which we highly recommend you to watch. It's a must-watch for every
space fan. Ok, but certainly, flying is not
the only reason why we should go to Titan, right?
No. Of course not. Titan has so much more to offer.
For example, Titan is the only place in the solar
system besides earth, with lakes, rivers and
rain. Yes, it rains on Titan, there is even
erosion from rain, there are large river systems,
and the largest lake, Kraken Mare, is really
ginourmous. With a surface area of 400,000 km²,
this sea is almost twice as large as all the
great north american lakes COMBINED. But we
didn't talk about a very interesting detail yet.
Titan is cold, very very cold. -179.5°C or
93.7K cold. So these lakes and rivers and
the precipitation on Titan can obviously not be made
out of water. They are in fact made out of
liquid methane and ethane. And what is powered
by liquid methane? That's right, Starship.
To make all this even more insane and fascinating,
there are strong indications that Titan, like Europa and Enceladus, has an ocean of
liquid water underneath the surface as well. Titan has been extensively probed by the Cassini
probe, which arrived at Saturn in the year
2004, and flew by Titan many many times on
its 13 year mission until 2017. With atmosphere
penetrating radar, Cassini made many high
resolution pictures of the lakes and surface features of Titan. And in January 2005, a small probe
called Huygens, which was attached to Cassini,
even landed on Titan. The pictures of this
strange world fascinate many people, including
us, to this very day. The probe set down in
a dry riverbed, and you can watch the whole
descent from orbit to touchdown, link to a
video in this video's description. Ok, so that is already insane enough, now it ends, right? Now finally
Starship please. Yes, just one second, there is one last intriguing possibility here.
Life. Again as with Europa and Enceladus,
we could have life in the subsurface ocean on Titan
but here probably only microbes, because the
tidal heating of Saturn is not as strong,
Titan being quite a lot further away from
Saturn than Enceladus. And please consider
subscribing to our channel because first it's completely free, and second
it will tremendously help us to continue talking about
such fascinating topics. and third you can even vote on the topic for the next JS space report.
We'd be extremely thankful for your support. On the surface, there are many organic
compounds, which could lead to the development
of life in the far future. Now, it is too
cold on Titan for life as we know it to form
on the surface, but when the sun grows larger
and more luminous in the far future, Titan
will actually become a very nice place, and
might be an excellent refuge for our extremely
far future descendants. So this world is so
incredibly fascinating on so many different levels that it's basically impossible to pack it all
into a short video, we'd need to make a 2
hour documentary on Titan to fully capture
the amazement this moon creates.
Now apart from Starship missions to Titan,
and the previously mentioned past missions,
NASA is planning to send the Dragonfly mission
to Titan. Dragonly is set to arrive on Titan
in 2034, good old conservative NASA timelines, why not the year 2500, but ok Dragonfly is essentially a nuclear
powered octocopter drone. The radio thermal
generator produces 70W of usable power, which
will allow the drone to fly with a speed of
up to 36 kph and 4 km of altitude and explore
many square kilometers of interesting surface
features as long as the battery lasts, which
normally will be quite a few years. Other
proposed missions for example include a submarine
that would explore the depths of Kraken Mare.
Wow, we really hope that we can see this one. Who
knows what the submarine might find deep
down below the lakes of Titan?
And now of course finally Starship. in our last week's video we suggested a stepwise approach to colonize
the outer solar system. We said that flying
directly to the Saturn system with the current
generation Starship would be psychologically
almost impossible due to the long travel time
of about 7 years. Of course, with giant O'Neill
Cylinders or Stanford Torus type of Spaceships,
we could travel there. But this is still very
much beyond our technological capability to
build. So for the time being, we'll have to
make do with Starship 1.0 or Starship 2.0.
In order to get to the Saturn system, first we will certainly need bases AND refueling depots
on Mars, in the asteroid belt on Ceres and
then in the Jupiter System on Callisto. From
Callisto then, we would be able to send Starships
to the Saturn system. They would arrive at
Enceladus and Titan. You can watch our last
week's video, link in the description to find
out what they would do on Enceladus. On Titan,
the Starships that would land, would of course
also immediately start setting up a base. But contrary
to Enceladus, the focus of Titan would first
be to construct a giant refueling base. Since
we said that Titan has lakes of liquid methane,
which is together with oxygen the main constituent
of Starship's fuel, this of course would be
perfect to refuel Starship. We'd basically
have an almost infinite supply of
Starship fuel. The oxygen we would of course
get from drilling holes deep down into the
subsurface ocean. We could then get water
up to the surface, which is of course always
needed by humans. Care should of course be
taken for eventual microbial life, so you certainly
shouldn't just drink that water straight away.
It would certainly need to be purified. From
the water we can then extract oxygen which
we of course also need to breathe, but the
same oxygen will then be cooled down and liquefied
for Starship fuel, to power the raptor engines
together with the liquid methane from the
Titan lakes. So Titan really has all the ingredients
to extremely easily set up a base there.
This moon would really be a wonderful destination,
not only to fly around in wing-suits, of which
we are sure it will become a total tourist
attraction, but no, we will also search for
life in the subsurface ocean. We will learn
about how methane can shape the surface of
a world, and how it behaves differently from
water. We can even marvel at rainbows, because
Titan is due to precipitation the only other
place in the solar system besides earth where
this beautiful phenomenon occurs. Here at least, due to the thick atmosphere, radiation would not
pose a problem any more. Solar radiation is
totally absorbed, and even the high energy
cosmic radiation is almost completely deflected
by the thick atmosphere. Of course the
low gravity on Titan still remains a problem, since it's even lower than on earth's moon with 0.138 g. So
if our future settlers want to live for long periods of time on Titan, rotating underground
habitats might be necessary in order to combat
bone and muscle loss. Or of course with genetic
engineering. But these are problems that can be solved. More and more Starships would arrive on Titan,
and so the bases would also grow. We assume
that we'll have the first base on Titan around
2050 realistically, if we consider that we
need all these other bases on Mars, Ceres
and Callisto before travelling to this distant moon. And from Titan we would of course expand further and
further into the depths of the outer solar
system. From Titan we could even visit ur-anus,
I mean Uranus, and even Neptune and the Kuiper
belt objects. Cliff jumping on Miranda might
become a thing, jumping down the steep cliffs
of Veronas Rupes, the highest cliffs in the
solar system, with an insane vertical cliff
wall of 20 km height. Again wonderfully visualized
in Erik Wernquist's Wanderers. Around Neptune, we could explore the geysers of Triton, another
fascinating world. And of course some day
even the heart of Pluto. There are many many
more worlds for us to explore in the future,
about which we'll of course all talk in seperate
episodes. And Titan will enable this. Titan
with its giant lakes will act as the perfect
base in the outer solar system. And who knows,
some of our younger viewers who watch this,
might one day even fly around in wing-suits
on this amazing distant world.
And if you are interested if Starship could also fly to the other moons of Jupiter and Saturn
for example Europa and Enceladus
you can watch this video right here. So don't forget to vote on the topic for the next video
and I would say on 2 the future!
