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Editor's choice fine picture: Bound to a landing at Titan
Bound to a Landing at Titan! This is a stunning view of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. It's just like we were going to enter the moon's atmosphere for a landing to the surface. Our craft's sensors would be very buzy at this moment, working hard to collect thin particles lying in the blue layers. Interactions between the Sun's ultraviolet light and Titan's atmosphere are generating a whole complex mixtures of hydrocarbons and carbon-nitrogen compounds, like ethane and acetylene, from the methane. Literally, we would be flying inside a primitive soup of life building blocks. Such molecules are further falling onto Titan where more evolution might bring life. The "Titan's way" is the other way in the Universe to produce life. The usual way is like life occurred at Earth, with interstellar clouds' dust and grains incoporated into comets which crashed on the planet. Both ways are likely to occur together and the primitive atmosphere of the Earth might have also endured the same processes than those seen at Titan. Titan is now thoroughly studied as part of a four-year comprehensive science in the Saturnian world performed by the joint NASA/ESA/Space Italian Agency Cassini mission. Cassini left Earth in 1997 and entered in orbit around Saturn in July 2004. The craft was carrying the European probe Huygens which was released to a successful landing at Titan in last January 2005. The Cassini orbiter is now continuing its mission which is similar to the one the Galileo mission performed at Jupiter. picture NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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