Titan: Earth-like on the Outside, Ocean World on the Inside

Shannon Mackenzie (1) , Samuel Birch , Sarah Hörst (2) , Christophe Sotin (3) , Erika Barth (4) , Juan Lora (5) , Melissa Trainer (6) , Paul Corlies (7) , Michael Malaska (8) , Ella Sciamma-O’brien (9) , Alexander Thelen , Elizabeth Turtle (1) , Jani Radebaugh (10) , Jennifer Hanley , Anezina Solomonidou (11) , Claire Newman (12) , Leonardo Regoli (1) , Sébastien Rodriguez (13) , Benoît Seignovert (3) , Alexander Hayes (14) , Baptiste Journaux , Jordan Steckloff , Delphine Nna-Mvondo , Thomas Cornet , Maureen Palmer , Rosaly Lopes , Sandrine Vinatier , Ralph Lorenz , Conor Nixon , Ellen Czaplinski , Jason Barnes , Ed Sittler , Andrew Coates

1 APL - Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory [Laurel, MD]
2 Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences [Baltimore]
3 LPG - Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique [UMR 6112]
4 Southwest Research Institute, CO, USA
5 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences [New Haven]
6 GSFC - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
7 EAPS - Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences [MIT, Cambridge]
8 JPL - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
9 NASA Ames Research Center, CA, USA
10 Department of Geological Sciences [BYU]
11 CALTECH - California Institute of Technology
12 Aeolis Research
13 IPGP (UMR_7154) - Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris
14 Department of Astronomy [Ithaca]

Thanks to the Cassini-Huygens mission, Titan, the pale orange dot of Pioneer and Voyager encounters, has been revealed to be a dynamic, hydrologically shaped, organic-rich ocean world offering unparalleled opportunities to explore prebiotic chemistry. And while Cassini-Huygens revolutionized our understanding of each of the three "layers" of Titan-the atmosphere, the surface, and the interior-we are only beginning to hypothesize how these realms interact. In this paper, we summarize the current state of Titan knowledge and discuss how future exploration of Titan would address some of the next decade's most compelling planetary science questions. We also demonstrate why exploring Titan, both with and beyond the Dragonfly New Frontiers mission, is a necessary and complementary component of an Ocean Worlds Program that seeks to understand whether habitable environments exist elsewhere in our solar system.

Keywords: Titan (2186); Planetary science (1255); Natural satellite surfaces (2208); Planetary atmospheres (1244); Planetary climates (2184); Titan (2186)

Domains: Physics [physics]; Astrophysics [astro-ph]; Earth and Planetary Astrophysics [astro-ph.EP]

Shannon Mackenzie, Samuel Birch, Sarah Hörst, Christophe Sotin, Erika Barth, et al.. Titan: Earth-like on the Outside, Ocean World on the Inside. The Planetary Science Journal, 2021, 2, 13 pp. ⟨10.3847/psj/abf7c9⟩. ⟨hal-03657991⟩