What Would It Be Like To Stand On Saturn's Moon Titan?

[Winston]

From what I heard in another video, between the dense atmosphere and low gravity, human powered flight would be trivially easy. Note that the pressure suit shown in the title screen would not be needed, he just used an image that's readily available online:

[video=youtube;mtagVmPz4DI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtagVmPz4DI[/video]

Let's Colonize Titan

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/lets-colonize-titan/

Titan Touchdown (Huygens probe)


[video=youtube;msiLWxDayuA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msiLWxDayuA[/video]

[video=youtube;gdJcRQMqRdc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdJcRQMqRdc[/video]

Energy Options for Future Humans on Titan

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1707/1707.00365.pdf

Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM)

[video=youtube;pL4LTFBO10Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL4LTFBO10Q[/video]

With an estimated NASA cost of $2.5 Billion (FY07), TSSM was originally proposed to launch in 2020, get gravity assists from Earth and Venus, and arrive at the Saturn system in 2029. The 4-year prime mission would include a two-year Saturn tour, a 2-month Titan aero-sampling phase, and a 20-month Titan orbit phase.

The Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) was officially created in January 2009 by the merging of the ESA's Titan and Enceladus Mission (TandEM) with NASA's Titan Explorer 2007 study, although plans to combine both concepts date at least back to early 2008

TSSM was competing against the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) proposal for funding since then, however in February 2009 it was announced that NASA/ESA had given EJSM priority ahead of TSSM, although TSSM will continue to be studied for a later launch date, probably sometime in the 2020s. Detailed assessment reports of the mission elements as well as a specific concept for the lake landing-module called Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) have been released in February and October 2009, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Saturn_System_Mission

 

[muddymooose]

Cold.

Seriously though it seems like an ideal place to search for extra-terran life forms, along with Enceladus. Water ice on the surface, potential liquid water below, geothermal features, and organic molecules make both really intriguing.

 

[Winston]

Cold.

Seriously though it seems like an ideal place to search for extra-terran life forms, along with Enceladus. Water ice on the surface, potential liquid water below, geothermal features, and organic molecules make both really intriguing.

A very cold and dense atmosphere has great advantages in the efficiency of the many useful processes which require temperature differentials as described in the outstanding video found immediately below which points out that, "In an ultimate sense, Titan's key export is cold itself and all of the advantages that offers."

Not mentioned in that video is helium-3 mining from Saturn's atmosphere which is mentioned in another video which points out that Saturn is a much better gas giant for such mining because of Jupiter's much greater gravity and insanely high radiation fields.

[video=youtube;HdpRxGjtCo0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdpRxGjtCo0[/video]

Also, on colonizing with self-replicating machines for automated mining with minimal human supervission and for exploratory and terraforming probes:

[video=youtube;V-96C4ExhWM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-96C4ExhWM[/video]

 

[Winston]

Intense methane rain storms batter Saturn’s largest moon, scientists report

https://astronomynow.com/2017/10/14/intense-storms-batter-saturns-largest-moon-scientists-report/

Titan, the largest of Saturn’s more than 60 moons, has surprisingly intense rainstorms, according to research by a team of UCLA planetary scientists and geologists. Although the storms are relatively rare — they occur less than once per Titan year, which is 29 and a half Earth years — they occur much more frequently than the scientists expected.

“I would have thought these would be once-a-millennium events, if even that,” said Jonathan Mitchell, UCLA associate professor of planetary science and a senior author of the research, which was published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Geoscience. “So this is quite a surprise.”

The storms create massive floods in terrain that are otherwise deserts. Titan’s surface is strikingly similar to Earth’s, with flowing rivers that spill into great lakes and seas, and the moon has storm clouds that bring seasonal, monsoon-like downpours, Mitchell said. But Titan’s precipitation is liquid methane, not water.

“The most intense methane storms in our climate model dump at least a foot of rain a day, which comes close to what we saw in Houston from Hurricane Harvey this summer,” said Mitchell, the principal investigator of UCLA’s Titan climate modeling research group.

[video=youtube;lIPan-rEQJA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIPan-rEQJA[/video]