On the morning of Saturday, November 5, an international team of planetary scientists woke up with great delight to the first Webb images of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Here, Principal Investigator Conor Nixon and others on the Guaranteed Time Observation (GTO) program 1251 team using Webb to inve
Images of Saturn’s moon Titan, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument November 4, 2022. Left: Image using F212N, a 2.12-micron filter sensitive to Titan’s lower atmosphere. The bright spots are prominent clouds in the northern hemisphere. Right: Color composite image using a combination of NIRCam filters: Blue=F140M , Green=F150W , Red=F200W , Brightness=F210M .
Titan is larger than Earth’s moon, and even bigger than the planet Mercury. Titan is the only moon in our solar system that has clouds and a dense atmosphere. Apart from Earth, Titan is the only place in our solar system known to have liquids on its surface. Evolution of clouds on Titan over 30 hours between November 4 and November 6, 2022, as seen by Webb NIRCam and Keck NIRC-2 . Titan’s trailing hemisphere seen here is rotating from left to right as seen from Earth and the Sun. Cloud A appears to be rotating into view while Cloud B appears to be either dissipating or moving behind Titan’s limb . Clouds are not long-lasting on Titan or Earth, so those seen on November 4 may not be the same as those seen on November 6.
After negotiations with the Keck staff and observers who had already been scheduled to use the telescope that evening, Imke and Katherine quickly queued up a set of observations. The goal was to probe Titan from its stratosphere to surface, to try to catch the clouds we saw with Webb.
Maël Es-Sayeh, a graduate student at the Universite Paris Cité, is particularly looking forward to these observations: “I will be using the data from Webb in my PhD research, so it’s very exciting to finally get the real data after years of simulations.
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