Saturn Moon Has Dunes Resembling the Sahara’s

Saturn’s moon Titan has huge regions covered with dunes, possibly made out of ice crystals or sand, international space scientists reported this week.

Images of Titan beamed back to Earth from the joint U.S.-European Cassini mission looked very much like sand dunes in the Sahara, the researchers said.

“It’s bizarre,” said Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona, who worked on the study published in the current issue of the journal Science.

“These images from a moon of Saturn look just like radar images of Namibia or Arabia,” Lorenz said.

“Titan’s atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s, its gravity is lower, its sand is certainly different -- everything is different except for the physical process that forms the dunes and resulting landscape,” he added.

The Cassini craft was launched in 1997, and reached Saturn in 2004 after cruising past Venus and Jupiter.

The latest radar images show the dunes are up to 500 feet high and hundreds of miles long.

Dark patches on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 47 moons, were at first thought to be seas -- but now they appear to be largely made up of these dunes.

Titan’s flat surface is very cold, with a temperature of nearly minus 300 degrees, and scientists believe its atmosphere may occasionally rain methane.

The existence of pristine dunes shows that wind recently blew fine grains of material around, the researchers wrote. They called the dunes’ presence “comforting,” because the processes that led to their formation could be studied on Earth.