Lifting Titan’s Veil by Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton, Cambridge University Press, £19.95, ISBN 0521793483
TITAN is a freezing hostile world, larger than Mercury and Pluto. Some even call it the Mars of the outer Solar System because people are so fascinated by it. This Saturnian satellite has a dense nitrogen and methane atmosphere. The surface temperature is about −176 °C which is close to the “triple point” of methane. That means it can rain methane, and methane snow drifts over placid methane seas lapping the inner walls of giant impact craters. A dim red light bathes the landscape, and hints of colour variation can be glimpsed in images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
On 14 January 2005, the Huygens probe will touch down, making Titan the most distant place so far visited by a soft-lander from Earth. In Lifting Titan’s Veil the challenges and pitfalls of a mammoth space mission are balanced by a thorough review of the painstaking scientific quest to understand this amazing mist-shrouded moon. It’s not surprising you get the best of both worlds when the authors are Ralph Lorentz, a member of the Cassini/Huygens team, and Jacqueline Mitton the renowned astronomy populariser.
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This excellent book skilfully blends what is known with what we hope to discover.