{"date":"2025-11-30","explanation":"If you could stand on Titan -- what would yo u see? The featured color view from Titan gazes across an unfamiliar and distant landscape on Saturn's largest moon. The scene was recorded by ESA's Huygens pr obe in 2005 after a 2.5-hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen lace d with methane. Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level, rocks strewn a bout the scene could well be composed of water and hydrocarbons frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of negative 179 degrees C. The large light-toned ro ck below and left of center is only about 15 centimeters across and lies 85 cent imeters away. The saucer-shaped spacecraft is believed to have penetrated about 15 centimeters into a place on Titan's surface that had the consistency of wet sand or clay. Huygen's batteries enabled the probe to take and transmit data fo r more than 90 minutes after landing. Titan's bizarre chemical environment may bear similarities to planet Earth's before life evolved.","hdurl":"https:\/\/apo d.nasa.gov\/apod\/image\/2511\/Titan_Huygens_960.jpg","media_type":"image","serv ice_version":"v1","title":"The Surface of Titan from Huygens","url":"https:\/\/a pod.nasa.gov\/apod\/image\/2511\/Titan_Huygens_960.jpg"}
