The James Webb Space Telescope has peered into the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon Titan, capturing the first evidence of cloud formation in this moon's northern hemisphere. Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system, right behind Jupiter's Ganymede.
A team of scientists pointed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at Titan in November of 2022 and July of 2023. With some help from the twin telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory on the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, the JWST found evidence of cloud convection, the process through which warmer air rises and brings moisture upward to form clouds. Clouds have been seen in Titan's southern hemisphere before, but never in the northern hemisphere, where most of the moon's seas and lakes are found.
