Titan: Where the Atmosphere Begins

WordPress backup · draft. Original pairing.

Imprints of raindrops in about 2.7-billion-year-old Earth rock have been used to estimate how dense the air was. Sanjoy Som, NASA Ames, via the BBC: nitrogen, little oxygen, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

ESA: Titan’s air is mostly nitrogen, with methane and many other organic compounds. NASA / Cassini, March 2011: methane rain reached Titan’s equatorial deserts.

The live site treats the fossils as Earth’s and the rain as Titan’s. The rhyme is nitrogen worlds. The pits stay on Earth.