Shangri-La (Titan)

Photo of the moon Titan from October 26, 2004; the large, dark area is the Shangri-La region

Shangri-La is a large and dark area on Titan , the largest moon on the planet Saturn .

The as yet little explored region was named after the mystical place Shangri-La , which comes from the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton . The different spelling in the past (Shangri-la, Shangri la, Shangrila) was uniformly set to Shangri-La by NASA in 2009 to match the diction in Hilton's novel.

It is believed that there are arid seas in Shangri-La. The area is littered with bright, higher-lying "islands". The plateau is bounded by larger regions: Xanadu in the east, Adiri in the west and Dilmun in the north. On January 14, 2005, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft landed in a western part of Shangri-La, near the border with Adiri , and was able to send radar images of a dune field to Earth.

Web links

Commons : Photos of Saturn system by Cassini  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Brief information from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) , accessed August 30, 2018

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ralf Jaumann, Ulrich Köhler, Frank Sohl, Daniela Tirsch, Susanne Pieth: Expedition to foreign worlds. 20 billion kilometers through the solar system. Springer-Verlag, 2017, p. 263.
2. ↑ Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature: Shangri-La in: Brief Information of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), accessed on August 30, 2018
3. ↑ Ralf Jaumann, Ulrich Köhler, Frank Sohl, Daniela Tirsch, Susanne Pieth: Expedition to foreign worlds. 20 billion kilometers through the solar system. Springer-Verlag, 2017, p. 265.
4. ^ Tilmann Althaus: Tropical methane lakes on Titan. Spectrum of Science, June 14, 2012 in: Spektrum.de, accessed on August 30, 2018
5. ↑ Michael Odenwald: Lake area on Saturn's moon Titan: Surprising discovery in Shangri-La. Focus Online, June 27, 2012 in: Focus Online, accessed August 30, 2018