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> Saturn's moon Titan as seen by Cassini spacecraft

Saturn's moon Titan as seen by Cassini spacecraft

author: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Novapix

reference: a-sat05-20021

Image Size 300 DPI: 17 * 17 cm

This false-color mosaic, made from infrared data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, reveals the differences in the composition of surface materials around hydrocarbon lakes at Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Titan is the only other place in the solar system that we know has stable liquid on its surface, though its lakes are made of liquid ethane and methane rather than liquid water. While there is one large lake and a few smaller ones near Titan's south pole, almost all of Titan's lakes appear near the moon's north pole. Scientists mapped near-infrared colors onto the visible color spectrum. Red in this image was assigned a wavelength of 5 microns (10 times longer than visible light), green 2.0 microns (four times longer than visible light), and blue 1.3 microns (2.6 times longer than visible light). The orange areas are thought to be evaporite -- the Titan equivalent of salt flats on Earth. The evaporated material is thought to be organic chemicals originally from Titan's haze particles that once dissolved in liquid methane. They appear orange in this image against the greenish backdrop of Titan's typical bedrock of water ice. In this mosaic, Kraken Mare, which is Titan's largest sea and covers about the same area as Earth's Caspian Sea and Lake Superior combined, can be seen spreading out with many tendrils on the upper right,. The big dark zone up and left of Kraken is Ligeia Mare, the second largest sea. Below Ligeia, shaped similar to a sports fan's foam finger that points just up from left, is Punga Mare, the third largest Titan Sea. Numerous other smaller lakes dot the area. Titan's north pole is located in the geographic location just above the end of the "finger" of Punga Mare. The data shown here were obtained by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer during a close flyby of Titan on Sept. 12, 2013.

Keywords for this photo:

2013 - ASTRONOMY - CASSINI - FALSE COLOR - INFRARED - LAKE - METHANE - SATELLITE - SATURN'S MOON - TITAN -