The rain falls hard on Titan

Huge storms have left their mark on the moon’s surface

Monsoons of methane rain flood the deserts of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, much more frequently than previously thought. A mammoth downpour seems to fall on the moon once every Titanian year, equivalent to 29.5 Earth years.

“I would have thought these would be once-a-millennium events, if even that, so this is quite a surprise,” says Jonathan Mitchell from the University of California Los Angeles. “The most intense methane storms in our climate model dump at least a foot of rain a day, which is close to what we saw in Houston from Hurricane Harvey this summer.” Alluvial fans, the cone shaped features usually associated with heavy rainfall on Earth, were recently spotted from 50-80º latitude in Cassini radar observations. This suggests that the weather on Titan depends on location just as much as it does on Earth. https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

The discovery was made by radar; Titan’s haze hampers direct observation