Los Angeles, Alta California
July 27, 2009
NASA names region on Saturn's moon "Aztlan"
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has named a region on the planet Saturn's largest moon "Aztlan." Aztlan is outlined below in the recent image taken by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's probe Cassini:
Aztlan on Earth is shown on the image below. Aztlan is the region on Earth where the Aztecs or Mexicas originated and migrated to Tenchochtitlan. Tenochtitlan is today Mexico City and the great migration is documented on La Tira de la Peregrinacion also know as the Códice Boturini which is archived at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.
The image of Titan was taken with the Cassini spacecraft on May 25, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 808,000 miles from Titan. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second largest moon in the solar system, rivaled only by Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Although Titan is classified as a moon, it is larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto. It has a planet-like atmosphere which is more dense than those of Mercury, Earth, Mars and Pluto. The atmospheric pressure near the surface is about 60 percent greater than Earth's. Titan's air is predominantly made up of nitrogen with other hydrocarbon elements which give Titan its orange hue. These hydrocarbon rich elements are the building blocks for amino acids necessary for the formation of life. Scientists believe that Titan's environment may be similar to that of the Earth's before life began putting oxygen into the atmosphere.
