| Proper Name | Titan | | Designation | Saturn VI | | Primary Planet | Saturn | | Family / Class | Regular moons | | Orbital Period | 15 days, 23 hours | | Distance from Saturn | Semi-Major Axis: 1,221,900 km
Periapsis: 1,186,700 km
Apoapsis: 1,257,100 km | | Eccentricity | 0.0288 | | Rotation Period | 15 days, 23 hours (synchronous orbit) | | Mean Diameter | 5,149 km
3,200 miles |
An immense moon of Saturn, orbiting the ringed planet once in about sixteen days, between the paths of the smaller moons Rhea and Hyperion. Titan's diameter of more than five thousand kilometres makes it the largest of Saturn's satellites by far, though it is not quite the largest moon in the entire Solar System. That title goes to Jupiter's moon Ganymede, though Ganymede's diameter is only about a hundred kilometres greater than Titan's.
Unusually for a moon, Titan has a thick atmosphere, characterised by a thick layer of orange haze. Since its discovery by Christian Huygens in 1655, what lay beneath this hazy atmosphere had remained in the realm of theory, until a probe bearing its discover's name landed on the surface exactly 350 years later. The Huygens lander revealed a frozen landscape sculpted by liquid methane.
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