Webb and Keck Telescopes Team for Unprecedented Look at Saturn’s Moon Titan –
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Images of Saturn’s moon Titan, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument November 4, 2022. Left: Image using F212N, a 2.12-micron filter sensitive to Titan’s lower atmosphere. The bright spots are prominent clouds in the northern hemisphere. Right: Color composite image using a combination of NIRCam filters: Blue=F140M (1.40 microns), Green=F150W (1.50 microns), Red=F200W (1.99 microns), Brightness=F210M (2.09 microns). Several prominent surface features are labeled: Kraken Mare is thought to be a methane sea; Belet is composed of dark-colored sand dunes; Adiri is a bright albedo feature. Download the Titan NIRCam image from the Resource Gallery. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Pagan (STScI). Science: JWST Titan GTO Team
On the morning of Saturday, November 5, an international team of planetary scientists woke up with great delight to the first Webb images of
Titan is larger than Earth’s moon, and even bigger than the planet Mercury. Titan is the only moon in our solar system that has clouds and a dense atmosphere. Apart from Earth, Titan is the only place in our solar system known to have liquids on its surface.
We had waited for years to use Webb’s infrared vision to study Titan’s atmosphere, including its fascinating weather patterns and gaseous composition, and also see through the haze to study albedo features (bright and dark patches) on the surface. Titan’s atmosphere is incredibly interesting, not only due to its methane clouds and storms, but also because of what it can tell us about Titan’s past and future – including whether it always had an atmosphere. We were absolutely delighted with the initial results.
Team member Sebastien Rodriguez from the Universite Paris Cité was the first to see the new images, and alerted the rest of us via email: “What a wake-up this morning (Paris time)! Lots of alerts in my mailbox! I went directly to my computer and started at once to download the data. At first glance, it is simply extraordinary! I think we’re seeing a cloud!” Webb Solar System GTO Project Lead Heidi Hammel, from the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), had a…
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