New images show 'land of lakes' on Saturn's largest moon Titan

PASADENA, Calif., Oct. 24 (UPI) -- A spacecraft circling Saturn's largest moon Titan has captured new images of a "land of lakes" at the orbiting body's north pole, NASA scientists say.

The Cassini spacecraft was in an optimal position to obtain new pictures of the liquid methane and ethane seas and lakes that reside near the top of Titan, revealing new clues about how the lakes formed and about the moon's Earth-like "hydrologic" cycle, which involves hydrocarbons rather than water, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported Wednesday.

"The view from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer gives us a holistic view of an area that we'd only seen in bits and pieces before and at a lower resolution," Jason Barnes, a participating scientist at the University of Idaho, said. "It turns out that Titan's north pole is even more interesting than we thought, with a complex interplay of liquids in lakes and seas and deposits left from the evaporation of past lakes and seas."

Parts of Titan's lakes and seas may have evaporated and left behind the Titan equivalent of Earth's salt flats, the researchers said, only on Titan the evaporated material is thought to be organic chemicals once dissolved in liquid methane.

"Titan's northern lakes region is one of the most Earth-like and intriguing in the solar system," JPL Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker said. "We know lakes here change with the seasons, and Cassini's long mission at Saturn gives us the opportunity to watch the seasons change at Titan, too."