The superficially Earthlike appearance of Titan, as imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope, is belied by its cold and inhospitable weirdness.
Titan is a strange world — a little bit Earthlike, if land were made of water ice, rivers and seas were filled with liquid methane and other hydrocarbons, and the atmosphere were thick and hazy, dotted with methane clouds. And now, the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) has observed two of those clouds during observations on Nov. 4 that have thrilled scientists, according to a NASA statement.
"Fantastic! Love seeing the cloud and the obvious albedo markings," Heidi Hammel, a planetary scientist at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and a project lead for JWST's solar system work, wrote in an email shared in the statement, referring to glimpses of bright and dark regions of Titan's surface
Compare Hubble's images from 1998.
