Mountain range spotted on Titan

The Cassini spacecraft has spied the tallest mountains yet seen on Titan, Saturn`s major moon.

The range is about 150km long (93 miles), 30km (19 miles) wide and about 1.5km (nearly a mile) high.

The feature was identified by the probe on a recent pass, using a combination of radar and infrared data.

Dr Bob Brown, one of the scientists behind the discovery, said it reminded him of the Sierra Nevada mountains
in the western US.

"One could call them Titan`s Sierras," the University of Arizona-Tucson researcher added.

The mountains lie south of the equator. Scientists told the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting tha
the range was probably as hard as rock, but made of icy materials.

The mountains appear to be coated with layers of organic, or carbon-rich, material. This could be methane
"snow".

Impact story

Titan is smothered in a thick photochemical haze, so Cassini must use instruments other than its optical
camera system to see features such as these mountains.

Dr Brown, who leads Cassini`s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (Vims) team, said a theory was now
emerging to explain how the range formed.
You can think of Titan as the Earth in deep freeze
Dr Rosaly Lopes, Nasa JPL

It was likely they grew as material welled up from below to fill the gaps opened when tectonic plates pulled
apart, he explained. This is similar to the way mid-ocean ridges are formed on Earth today.

Dr Brown said the mountains were close to a circular feature which might be an ancient impact basin. He
speculated that it was possible a space collision in Titan`s past had kicked off the whole process.

"The energy released in the impact was probably large enough for the impactor to punch through the crust of
Titan which then caused tectonic disruption in the area, and that these [mountains] occurred some time
afterwards.