Cool Lakes on Titan
This lake business on Saturn’s giant moon Titan is getting pretty cool. In the last Cassini flyby of Titan the RADAR instrument captured this radio-wavelength image of one of the large lakes in the north polar regions of Titan. Click the picture to go to the full-res version.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL
This one shows a large island, about the size of the big island of Hawaii, near the border of a hydrocarbon lake in Titan’s northern arctic region. The imaging team, somewhat hampered by Titan’s dense smog, captured this image of a northern lake (not the same one shown in the RADAR image above). Go to CICLOPS for more information.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Although these lakes are not water, there is something tantalizingly familiar about the landforms. It is a landscape that begs to be explored on the surface or perhaps from unmanned balloons deployed by a future mission to Saturn.