What would be involved in landing people on Titan?
We find out what is required in order to put man on Saturn’s moon
Sending people to Saturn’s moon Titan is an enormous technical challenge. Image Credit: All About Space/Imagine Publishing
Asked by Scott Haughy
Although Titan is often described as having an atmosphere similar to Earth, sending people there is still an enormous technical challenge.
There are three major factors that contribute to the difficulty associated with visiting Titan: while the moon has an atmosphere and potentially a weather cycle it is a cool -179 degrees Celsius (-290 degrees Fahrenheit), far too cold for us to survive. Second, the atmospheric composition is mostly nitrogen and methane, which really isn’t suitable for human life or any other life that we know of. The last thing is the vast travel time to get there -the Cassini-Huygens probe took over seven years to reach Saturn, a journey that is too long for our current crewed spacecraft to achieve.
Answered by Josh Barker at the National Space Centre
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