A Free for All: The Cassini - Huygen's Mission

Source: NASA.gov

The picture on the left is one of the most profound images in all of human history. Take a guess as to what it is a picture of?

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It seems to have roundish rocks in a very orange-ish air.

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Since this is an astronomy class, this is probably not a picture of the Earth. So could it be Mars?

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But those rocks in the picture don't look like they're from Mars, because they are so round. They look like something from a dried lake on Earth, but the atmosphere looks so much like the pictures taken by the rovers on Mars.

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In fact, this is not a planet. It is a satellite of the beautiful Saturn. This is Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

Source: NASA.gov

It was a long-held belief in the scientific community that in order to find life and other interesting phenomenon in the solar system, you needed to visit the planets. And since we knew that all the planets beyond Mars were gas giants, there was absolutely no point in looking for signs of life on those planets. However, venturing into the solar system through the Voyager program, it was revealed that the moons of the gas giants were far more robust than the icy worlds we had always imagined them to be. The gravitational pull of their monstrous parent planets, especially Jupiter and Saturn, created tectonic activity, thermal vents, active vol
canoes, and underground oceans within these satellites. Suddenly, there was an uptake interest to explore these moons, one of which was Titan.

Titan had always been a mystery, because looking at it through a telescope, or even through a probe, would only allow you to see is a mysterious yellow-orange haze. However, in 1997, the joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency sent the Cassini-Huygens probe to explore Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens reached Saturn in June 30, 2004, and studied the Saturnian system, including its many moons. One of Cassini's main missions was to see variations in the haze of Titan, and attempt to peer through the clouds through the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on board Cassini, which yielded a stitched image seen on the left.

One of the most interesting finds by Cassini-Huygens was that beneath the haze of Titan, there existed an entire lakes and possibly oceans of pure hydrocarbons, particularly liquid methane. Titan seemed to show varying atmospheric conditions, including