Universe Today
What will a human experience while standing on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, even with the protection of a pressurized spacesuit? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as William O’Hara, who is the Executive Director of Explore Titan investigated what physical attributes a human will experience when standing on Titan’s surface. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, mission planners, and the public better understand the risks associated with sending humans to far-off worlds for long periods of time and how to develop technologies to mitigate these risks.
For the study, O’Hara used a combination of data evaluation and computer models to simulate what a human would experience standing on the surface of Titan under a variety of conditions, including physical, visual, audio, and scent. As O’Hara notes, this is due to the limited literature, including news articles and scientific studies, regarding sending humans to Titan, including colonization. For context, the surface temperature of Titan is -179 degrees Celsius (-290 degrees Fahrenheit), the surface pressure of Titan is 1.5x Earth's surface pressure, and the surface gravity of Titan is just under 14 percent of Earth's surface gravity.
In the end, O’Hara concluded that “additional information” is required to better understand what a human would experience standing on the surface of Titan, including involving lighting and standing at various locations across Titan’s surface. While not mentioned in the study, the surface of Titan only receives approximately 0.1 percent of the light that Earth receives, which accounts for Titan only receiving 1 percent of the light from Earth, with 90 percent of this number being reduced from Titan’s thick and hazy atmosphere.
For context, this compares to approximately civil twilight on Earth, which occurs about ten minutes after sunset. This is in stark contrast to images sent back by the Huygens probe, which landed on Titan’s surface in January 2005 and showed a bright surface, which was created from various image processing techniques. Therefore, humans would not experience the same lighting as the Huygens probe gave the impression existed on the surface of Titan.
The study notes, “This study is the first attempt at aggregating what we know about Titan to factually estimate the experience of a human on its surface. The results will inform future work including surface EVA [extravehicular activity] space suit design, habitat design, virtual reality simulations and terrestrial analog exploration. Next steps will be to extract from this work environmental requirements and potential hazards that will need to be addressed.”
This study comes as NASA is preparing to send its Dragonfly quadcopter mission to land on Titan’s surface and “hop” across various regions to better understand the habitability potential of Titan, whose diameter is approximately 50 percent larger than Earth’s Moon. Dragonfly is currently slated to launch in July 2028 and land on Titan’s surface in 2034, which will be followed by a science phase that is slated to last approximately 3.3 years. Along with imaging cameras, Dragonfly’s scientific instruments will include a mass spectrometer, gamma-ray spectrometer, neutron spectrometer, and seismometer.
As this study notes, the literature of sending humans to Titan is still limited, possibly due to the current focus involving sending humans back to the Moon and on to Mars. Another reason could be the distance, as spacecraft currently take approximately six years to travel from Earth to Titan, so this would require substantial logistical hurdles to accommodate humans traveling such an enormous amount of distance and time.
The study concludes by stating, “This work benefits follow on efforts to further mature concepts for human missions deeper into our solar system following NASA’s blueprints.”
What will humans experience when standing on the surface of Titan in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
