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SPACE — NASA recently highlighted the work of a Brigham Young University professor who helped discover a mountain peak on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
"As explorers, we're motivated to find the highest or deepest places, partly because it's exciting. But Titan's extremes also tell us important things about forces affecting its evolution," said Jani Radebaugh, a geology professor at BYU.
Using images and data from the Cassini spacecraft, a research team that Radebaugh is part of was able to discover oceans, rain, wind, dunes, lava flows and mountains on Titan, according to a press release from BYU.
“We had to wait until we got all the way to Titan to see these landforms that are so similar to Earth,” Radebaugh said.
The mountain peak is 10,948 feet high and is found within a trio of mountainous ridges, according to NASA.
"It's not only the highest point we've found so far on Titan, but we think it's the highest point we're likely to find," said Stephen Wall, deputy lead of the Cassini radar team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The next step for researchers will be trying to figure out what could produce such tall peaks on an icy, ocean world.
"There is lot of value in examining the topography of Titan in a broad, global sense, since it tells us about forces acting on the surface from below as well as above," Radebaugh said.
