NASA’s Cassini probe finds lofty mountain ranges on Jupiter’s moon TitanMumbai, Mar 28(AZINS) Instruments on board NASA’s Cassini mission have just discovered the presence of a trio of ridges on Jupiter’s largest moon, Titan, which also features what is expected to be the highest point on its surface.

The ridges, named Mithrim Montes, were discovered through its largely opaque atmosphere, revealing the highest peak standing at 10,948 feet (3,337 meters,) along with the presence of other peaks at around the 10,000 meter mark.

While this mountain range is certainly tall, it is still dwarfed by the highest peak in our solar system--the 22,000 meter high Olympus Mons on Mars.

"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," said Stephen Wall, deputy lead of the Cassini radar team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The mission also discovered additional peaks in the desolate region known as Xanadu, close to the location where the European Space Agency (ESA’s) Huygen’s probe touched down.

"As explorers, we're motivated to find the highest or deepest places, partly because it's exciting. But Titan's extremes also tell us important things about forces affecting its evolution," said Jani Radebaugh, a Cassini radar team associate at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who led the research.

The fact that there exists topographical features such as mountain ranges points to the occurrence of tectonic forces on Titan, just as it exists on Earth. However, given the significantly greater distance of Titan from the Sun, the process of geological deformations taking place on this moon is far slower than it happens on Earth where it is helped along due to the higher temperatures associated with being in closer proximity to the Sun.

Just as Earth has an outer crust (the upper Mantle,) Titan’s icy crust is situated above an ocean of liquid water. This layer of hot, high-pressure rock steadily flows and deforms over the ages, resulting in the creation of terrestrial features like mountain ranges.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency.