Recent images taken by Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, show the first pictures of the sun reflecting off the largest lake on Titan known as Kraken Mare that also include the boundary of the lake.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been observing Saturn’s Titan moon, and recording images of the polar hydrocarbon seas.
Recent images taken by Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, show the first pictures of the sun reflecting off the largest lake on Titan known as Kraken Mare that also include the boundary of the lake.
Since Titan is too cold for liquid water to exist there, the lakes and atmosphere are part of a methane cycle that is similar to the water cycle here on Earth.
Methane evaporates into the atmosphere, condenses into clouds, and rains back into the lakes where it forms into rivers, valleys and deltas.
Also visible in the picture is the coastline of Kraken Mare that experts call a bathtub ring.
The old coast is evidence that the methane sea used to be at a higher level than it is today.
A team of researchers from several institutions including NASA, the European Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena are working together on the Cassini-Huygens mission.
