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Explanation: What would it look like to fly over Titan? Radar images from NASA's robotic Cassini satellite in orbit around Saturn have been digitally compiled to simulate such a flight. Cassini has swooped past Saturn's cloudiest moon several times since it arrived at the ringed planet in 2004. The virtual flight featured here shows numerous lakes colored black and mountainous terrain colored tan. Surface regions without detailed vertical information appear more flat, while sufficiently mapped regions have their heights digitally stretched. Among the basins visualized is Kraken Mare, Titan's largest lake which spans over 1,000 kilometers long. Titan's lakes are...

New images from NASA have captured the beautiful golden reflection of the sun on the polar sea of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It is the latest image from a collaborative four year mission studying the Saturnine system. The mirror-like reflection, known as the specular point, is in the south of Titan's largest sea, Kraken Mare – just north of an island archipelago separating two separate parts of the sea. To the human eye, this would appear as a haze but through Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), “real color information” is provided in wavelengths that correspond to atmospheric...

That’s what the Sun looks like reflecting off the seas of Titan, that moon of Saturn that excites astrobiologists because its chemistry resembles what early Earth could have looked like. This image represents the first time this “sunglint” and Titan’s northern polar seas have been captured in one mosaic, NASA said. What’s more, if you look closely at the sea surrounding the sunlight, you can see what scientists dub a “bathtub ring.” Besides looking pretty, this image from the Cassini spacecraft shows the huge sea (called Kraken Mare) was actually larger at some point in Titan’s past. “The southern portion...

A photo from Cassini shows sunlight reflecting from a giant lake of methane on the northern half of Saturn's moon Titan. (CNN) -- NASA scientists revealed Friday a first-of-its-kind image from space showing reflecting sunlight from a lake on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It's the first visual "smoking gun" evidence of liquid on the northern hemisphere of the moon, scientists said, and the first-ever photo from another world showing a "specular reflection" -- which is reflection from a liquid surface. Jaumann said he was surprised when he first saw the photos transmitting from Cassini, orbiting Saturn about a billion...