Saturn's Moon Titan covered with sand dunes and ice?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Saturn's moon Titan has huge regions covered with dunes, possibly made out of ice crystals, sand or some other unknown material, international space scientists reported on Thursday.

Images of Titan beamed back to Earth from the joint U.S.-European Cassini mission look very much like sand dunes in the Sahara desert, Namibia, Saudi Arabia and Australia, the researchers said.

"It's bizarre," said Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona, who worked on the study.

"These images from a moon of Saturn look just like radar images of Namibia or Arabia. Titan's atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, its gravity is lower, its sand is certainly different -- everything is different except for the physical process that forms the dunes and resulting landscape."

The Cassini craft was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004 after an interplanetary cruise that took it past Venus and Jupiter.

The latest radar images show the dunes are up to 500 feet (150 meters) high and hundreds of miles (kilometers) long.

Dark patches on Titan, the largest of Saturn's 47 moons, were at first thought to be seas -- but now they appear to be largely made up of these dunes.

read about the science behind the discovery here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000820.html