Touch Down On Titan Titan Crew Vehicle landing. This is an ongoing series; see Mars colony terraforming program image series links below. Titan is the sixth ellipsoidal moon from Saturn. Titan has a diameter roughly 50% larger than Earth's moon and is 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in the Solar System, after Jupiter's moon Ganymede, and it is larger by volume than the smallest planet, Mercury, although only half as massive. Equatorial surface gravity: 1.352 m/s2 (0.14 g). Escape velocity: 2.639 km/s. Surface temperature is about 94 K (−179 °C, or −290 °F). Titan's atmosphere is the only dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere in the Solar System aside from the Earth's – which makes it a prime target for the nitrogen importation phase of the Mars terraforming program. The atmospheric composition in the stratosphere is 98.4% nitrogen with the remaining 1.6% composed mostly of methane (1.4%) and hydrogen (0.1–0.2%). There are trace amounts of other hydrocarbons, such as ethane, diacetylene, methylacetylene, acetylene and propane, and of other gases, such as cyanoacetylene, hydrogen cyanide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, cyanogen, argon and helium. Titanian atmosphere is denser than Earth's, with a surface pressure about 1.45 times that of Earth's. Titan's atmosphere is about 1.19 times as massive as Earth's overall, or about 7.3 times more massive on a per surface area basis -- it is for this reason that I elected to go with a spherical pressure hull for the Crew Vehicle – a sphere for its structural strength -- to withstand numerous entries, the buffeting, and turbulence of repeat descents (and ascents) through the atmosphere of Titan. The nitrogen importation phase will last 300 years, the craft must service numerous flights. The haze in Titan's atmosphere contributes to the moon's anti-greenhouse effect by reflecting sunlight back into space, making its surface significantly colder than its upper atmosphere. The moon receives just about 1% of the amount of sunlight Earth gets. Titan's clouds, probably composed of methane, ethane or other simple organics, are scattered and variable, punctuating the overall haze. The findings of the Huygens probe indicate that Titan's atmosphere periodically rains liquid methane and other organic compounds onto the moon's surface. The Huygens probe was unable to detect the direction of the Sun during its descent, and although it was able to take images from the surface, the Huygens team likened the process to "taking pictures of an asphalt parking lot at dusk" It is from these descriptions (and numerous viewings of the Huygens descent video) that I took my inspiration to create this, and the following, images in this sequence. All models are my own. Models constructed in Bryce 6.5 and rendered in Bryce 7 Pro. As always thank you for your interest, thoughtful comments, and encouragement.