Featured planetary moon
Titan
A moon with weather, rivers and seas made from hydrocarbons.
Titan carries a dense nitrogen-rich atmosphere and a methane cycle that shapes clouds, rain, channels and lakes. Beneath the haze is a world where familiar landscape processes operate with unfamiliar materials.
- Orbit representation
- Representative mean elements
- Surface
- derived map
Reference measurements
The numbers that shape this world
- Mean radius
- 2,574.8 km
- Mean orbital distance
- 1,221,900 kmSemi-major axis around the parent body.
- Orbital period
- 15.945 days
- Eccentricity
- 0.029
- Inclination
- 0.3°Local Laplace plane from the JPL pole
- Rotation
- Tidally locked
World portrait
Earth-like processes, alien chemistry
Titan is best understood through process rather than appearance: evaporation, precipitation and erosion occur, but water ice behaves like bedrock while methane and ethane fill the active cycle.
System geometry
Titan in motion around Saturn
Titan travels at a mean orbital distance of 1,221,900 km and completes a circuit in 15.945 days. Its eccentricity of 0.029 and 0.3° inclination are read against Local Laplace plane from the JPL pole. Synchronous rotation keeps the same hemisphere broadly oriented toward the parent body.
Representation notes
What Explore is showing
JPL fitted mean elements describe general orbit shape and orientation; they are not an accurate ephemeris.
Reviewed official global map prepared as a 1K display texture. Small no-data seams were cleaned without inventing large-scale landmarks; final seam, pole and lighting review remains device-dependent.
Provenance