Titan Has Four Seasons Much Like Earth's, but There Is One Very Strange Catch to Them: because Saturn Takes About 29 Years to Circle the Sun, a Single Season on Titan Drags on for Roughly Seven Earth Years

Titan has four seasons much like Earth's, but there is one very strange catch to them: because Saturn takes about 29 years to circle the Sun, a single season on Titan drags on for roughly seven Earth years

Imagine a winter that starts when you are a child and ends when you are a teenager. Years of the same cold and dim light, lasting for much of a decade before spring even flickers. On Earth that is impossible. On Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, it is roughly the seasonal calendar, where one season lasts about as long as an entire childhood. NASA calls it the only moon in the solar system with clouds and a thick atmosphere, and it’s the only planet …

Saturn’s moon Titan has rain, rivers, seas, dunes, and seasons just like Earth, but at 290 degrees below zero the rain is liquid methane, the rivers carve ice, and the mountains are water frozen harder than granite — and in 2028 NASA sends a drone to see if it hides life.

Saturn's moon Titan looks uncannily like Earth: clouds, rain, rivers, lakes, seas, coastlines, dunes, and seasons. Then you learn the rain is liquid methane, the rivers carve valleys through bedrock made of water ice frozen harder than granite, and the whole cycle runs at about 290 degrees below zero. Its atmosphere is four times denser than Earth's and its gravity one-seventh as strong, so methane raindrops fall slowly and grow far larger than …