Rosaly Lopes Colloquium Abstract (October 2, 2019)

Global Geology of Titan from Cassini

Titan has shown itself to be one of the solar system's most intriguing objects for study, with a variety of unusual candidate materials on its surface, such as hydrocarbons. Titan is very geologically complex, and features found include large craters, cryovolcanoes, mountains, flowing channels, vast fields of dunes, and giant lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons. Titan is very Earth-like in its geology, despite the very different surface conditions and composition, and has become known as "the Earth of the outer solar system". This talk will discuss the geology of Titan, primarily from observations made by the Cassini Radar instrument, and Titan’s potential for habitability.