The Committee to Nuke Elysium

The team discovered that in order to shape Titan’s dunes, the moon’s westerly winds must be about 50 percent stronger than previously predicted. Though these westerlies only prevail about two percent of the time on Titan, they are the driving forces shaping the moon’s dunes. “That’s what does all the geomorphic work,” Burr confirmed.

The findings are further proof that Titan is a world of extremes, in which brief periods of seasonally-driven unrest can have more influence than the moon’s “normal” weather during the rest of the Saturnian year. It also demonstrates how a discarded, antiquated piece of equipment can be reinvented to resolve modern questions.

Along those lines, Burr plans to use Ames wind tunnel to investigate Titan’s past. “We just had some new work funded, and we get to go back now and experiment with different paleoclimates on Titan,” she told me. “There’s the thought that Titan has gone through some very significant climatic shifts over the age of the solar system, and the atmosphere we see there now may be unusual.”

Given that the moon supports such a variety of bizarre features, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that it’s an atypical place not just by the solar system’s standards, but by its own as well. If that’s true, then we are just lucky enough to catch it during its more dynamic episodes, when rivers are flowing, winds are blowing, and sand is formed in its skies.