Spacecraft spots the tallest mountain seen on Saturn's moon Titan
Anyone up for a low-gravity hike on an icy moon?
The Cassini spacecraft, which has explored Saturn and its moons from close range for about 12 years, spotted a relatively high mountain peak on Titan, the ringed planet's largest moon.
The mountain is about 10,948 feet tall -- slightly shorter than Oregon's Mount Hood -- and was found in mountainous ridges called the Mithrim Montes, according to NASA.
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"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," Stephen Wall, deputy lead of the Cassini radar team, said in a statement.
Titan is an incredibly hazy planet, with a thick atmosphere rich in nitrogen, so Cassini scientists used the spacecraft's radar instrument to peer through the haze and check out the surface of the world beneath.
Titan's largest peaks seem to be clustered near the moon's equator, NASA said, and there are other mountains that are similar in height within the Mithrim Montes range and the part of the world called Xanadu.
Scientists have also found other mountains near the landing area where the Huygens probe touched down on Titan in 2005 after Cassini arrived in the planetary system.
Learning more about the moon's topography can help scientists piece together a geological history of the cold moon, which may harbor an ocean beneath its crust.
"As explorers, we're motivated to find the highest or deepest places, partly because it's exciting," Jani Radebaugh, Cassini scientist, said in the statement. "But Titan's extremes also tell us important things about forces affecting its evolution."
Scientists think that it's possible Titan could have some tectonic activity that's changing the surface of the moon, possibly producing the mountains seen by Cassini.
Titan also has lakes and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons -- organic molecules made of hydrogen and carbon -- which could erode the landscape over time.
The solar system is stacked with mountains.
Mount Everest, for example, stretches to more than 29,000 feet, while Mars' Olympus Mons -- which climbs up to an impressive 84,480 feet -- is the largest volcano yet found in the solar system.
Mountains even appear in the most unlikely parts of our cosmic neighborhood.
Pluto, which was one thought to be an icy, cratered rock, actually has mountains made of water-ice the size of the Rockies and Appalachian mountain ranges on Earth.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
