Friday, September 9, 2022

 -Natalia Rossighnoli


Titan is irresistible. Pity that it's so damn far away. We now know that the Dragonfly mission, once launched, and then given sufficient travel time, will land adjacent the crater "Selk". This location will allow Dragonfly to study an area where heated and metamorphosed organics are likely. All set? Not quite, because why Selk and not some other crater and location

Image of Selk taken from 2nd link above.

  • Slides from four minutes to eight minutes are very algebraic. Our speaker is making emphasis on Titans impact zones. Impactors land generally equatorial, generally high-speed and passing through the shortest routes of Titan's thick atmosphere. Generally finding the places where it presumably makes lakes least often, if only because that's where the least erosion seems to happen.
  • Slide at 10:00 singles out a different crater than Selk. Melbourne crater (probably a caption-mistranslated "Menrva") seems to have a case to say it's the eldest of Titian's craters, perhaps primordial. One one hand, that's neat. On the other hand, what can you do with it if Dragonfly doesn't carry a drill? You would just see topical sediment.
  • Conclusions at 12:10
In the end our speaker was emphasizing crater density on Titan. After-all, this talk was part of the Planetary Crater Consortium and not specifically a talk about Dragonfly. But it lead me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. I knew very little of Titan's various craters beforehand. And the answer to; "Why Selk and not (I'm pretty sure it's Menrva)" are in the links above. Though I find the topic to be fairly controversial.

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