Although it’s a frigid near-300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero on Titan, to the science world, Saturn’s largest moon is hot right now.

So hot, in fact, that SF State Geology Professor Leonard Sklar, SF State graduate students and colleagues from Wheaton College in Massachusetts are embarking on a three-year, NASA-funded project to better understand it.

After receiving images in 2004 from the Huygens probe sent by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which launched in 1997, scientists across the country were shocked. The images revealed Titan’s landscape is surprisingly similar to Earth’s, with lakes, seas, dunes and river channels.

According to NASA, Cassini’s observations of Titan have given scientists a glimpse of what Earth might have been like before life evolved.

“The discovery of rivers on Titan sent chills down 10,000 spines on Earth,” said Sklar, whose research focuses on erosion processes and the formation of river channels. “It looked like the pictures could have been taken over Utah.”

After submitting a proposal to NASA in collaboration with Wheaton College’s geology professor Geoffrey Collins, Sklar secured a $130,800 grant last year to start the project. Working with Sklar are SF State geoscience graduate students Beth Zygielbaum and Peter Polito, who will specialize in different parts of the project to broaden its scope.

Before the 2004 launch, scientists knew almost nothing about Titan. Its mass is about one-eighth the size of Earth’s, has a temperature of minus 180 degrees Celsius (minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit), a “rock” surface made of water-ice, and the liquid that falls from the sky and flows through the rivers of methane.

“Before, Titan was basically a blank slate,” said Collins, a planetary scientist who focuses on the moons of Saturn. “People had all kinds of ideas of what it was like, but the first thing we actually saw was something no one expected.”

The team will have more images from Titan to study for longer than was expected. The Cassini-Huygens mission was originally scheduled to end in July, but NASA announced Tuesday it will be extended by two years.

“This extension is not only exciting for the science community, but for the world to continue to share unlocking Saturn’s secrets,” said Jim Green, director of Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters.

Sklar also said the patterns in the cloud formations on Titan are essentially the same as those on Earth, and the amount of methane on Titan is comparable to that of water on Earth.

“Scientists were literally on the edge of their seats when we first saw the images,” Sklar said. “Below the clouds we saw these branching black lines that could only be rivers. For people like me, who are obsessed with rivers, to see this phenomenon of an Earth-like resource is amazing. It almost brings tears to my eyes.”

Along with Collins, Sklar and his team are trying to understand the liquid methane cycle on the surface of Titan and the strength and resistance of the ice rock to erosion.

The project will eventually examine precise erosion measurement requiring an ice channel and a walk-in freezer to replicate the temperature on Titan, but the current goal is to simply replicate the kind of ice rock found on Titan.

The SF State team is using liquid nitrogen, rather than the combustible methane that rains on Titan, to get the temperature in their freezer as cold as Titan. After forming small balls of polycrystalline ice, they drop them one by one, over and over, onto discs of the same type of ice.

“It’s a very nerdy kind of study,” said Sklar.

Although the grad students started the project by putting their heads together to figure out how to make the model to carry out the study, they are now narrowing their individual research.

Polito, working with the assumption that ice is the bedrock of Titan, is trying to find how ice will erode on the bedrock of a river channel.

“In order to make larger estimates, we have to break it down to the smallest component,” said Polito. “So it’s kind of like caveman science at this point, but the next step will be to actually build an ice channel to study a whole range of sediment sizes, like in nature.”

Zygielbaum focused on how to replicate the conditions of Titan and also referred to the small-scale nature of the project.

“It’s a lot of trial and error,” she said. “It took us six months to figure out how to even make the right kind of ice, which is a dense, polycrystalline ice.”

Before the SF State team’s research, there was no available information on ice strength below minus 130 degrees Celsius.

“Nobody had done this before at such low temperatures,” said Zygielbaum. “There was a big learning curve.”

The project will be carried out at the University of California, Berkeley’s Field Station in Richmond, which Sklar currently manages. It will conclude in April 2010.

Later phases of the study will include recreating the process of erosion to quantify the strength of the ice rock.

“This project is enabling us to start somewhere, with something simple, and work up to it,” said Collins. “We know about this process on earth, but we don’t know it on Titan. We have this whole body of knowledge about how Earth erodes, now we can test that knowledge.”

According to a NASA press release, the spacecraft’s “stunning discoveries and images have revolutionized our knowledge of Saturn and its moons.”

The NASA grant will cover the first phase of the study. After their first discoveries, the SF State team hopes to secure further funding to continue research. Ultimately, the team hopes their study will test many theories about Earth.

“As a scientist, when you get the chill, you have to follow your curiousity,” Sklar said. “This project will force us to test ourselves — how much do we really understand about Earth?”

Sklar said that while the study seems esoteric, its findings can help understand long-term processes like climate change.

“Titan has a lot of Earth qualities, and this means we have a lot of geological questions to ask,” Collins said. “But it’s still a good decade or so before we can write the textbook on Titan.”