NASA Award Paper


The Face Behind The Veil. Titan is a little larger than Mercury--the smallest major planet inhabiting our Solar System. Indeed, Titan would have been classified as a major planet in its own right if it orbited our Sun instead of Saturn. The Huygens Probe images lifted the veil from the face of this distant moon-world, revealing a youthful surface that is both smooth and relatively free of impact craters. Huygens also found that this icy, hydrocarbon-saturated moon's climate includes those heavy rains of gasoline, as well as raging, roaring winds. Some of Titan's surface features were found to be hauntingly akin to certain surface features on Earth. What I discovered was that both the weather and moon were in my favor on my best days fishing. So basically I was fishing at the perfect time and didn't realize it. So then I began to wonder if I could use this information to my advantage. I figured out that I most certainly could use this information to my advantage by learning some simple tips about what the weather was doing and what phase the moon was in before I headed out onto the water. The ring around the Earth eventually began to condense into blobs that then proceeded to merge and create a large and brightly glowing sphere--our primordial Moon. Our Moon would have appeared to be ten times larger than it does today in Earth's ancient sky--if anyone had been around to see it.