Titan: Earth-like on the Outside, Ocean World on the Inside

TL;DR

This paper reviews current knowledge of Titan, emphasizing its layered structure and potential habitability, and advocates for future exploration to understand its complex interactions and astrobiological potential.

Contribution

It summarizes Titan's known properties and highlights the importance of upcoming missions like Dragonfly for advancing planetary science and astrobiology.

Findings

Titan has a dynamic, organic-rich ocean world structure.

Future missions will address key questions about Titan's habitability.

Exploration of Titan is crucial for understanding Ocean Worlds in the solar system.

Abstract

Thanks to the Cassini-Huygens mission, Titan, the pale orange dot of Pioneer and Voyager encounters has been revealed to be a dynamic, hydrologically-shaped, organic-rich ocean world offering unparalleled opportunities to explore prebiotic chemistry. And while Cassini-Huygens revolutionized our understanding of each of the three layers of Titan--the atmosphere, the surface, and the interior--we are only beginning to hypothesize how these realms interact. In this paper, we summarize the current state of Titan knowledge and discuss how future exploration of Titan would address some of the next decade's most compelling planetary science questions. We also demonstrate why exploring Titan, both with and beyond the Dragonfly New Frontiers mission, is a necessary and complementary component of an Ocean Worlds Program that seeks to understand whether habitable environments exist elsewhere in our solar system.