PASADENA, Calif., Dec. 19 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they have for the first time captured images of sunlight reflected off of a liquid surface from another world -- in this case, Saturn's moon Titan.
The photograph from NASA's Cassini Spacecraft confirms the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, lake-shaped basins, the U.S. space program said in a statement released Friday.
NASA said Cassini scientists had been looking for the glint, also known as a specular reflection, since the spacecraft began orbiting Saturn in 2004. But Titan's northern hemisphere, which has more lakes than the southern hemisphere, has been veiled in winter darkness, and the sun only began to directly illuminate the northern lakes recently as it approached the equinox of August 2009.
The "serendipitous" image was captured on July 8, 2009, using Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, NASA said, and was published online.
"This one image communicates so much about Titan -- thick atmosphere, surface lakes and an otherworldliness," said Bob Pappalardo, a Cassini project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It's an unsettling combination of strangeness yet similarity to Earth. This picture is one of Cassini's iconic images."
