Titan's Surface Revealed in Technicolor

A set of newly-released images showing the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in color indicates that the celestial body may be a lot more similar to Earth than first believed. Granted, its surface is covered by a thick, yellow, unbreathable atmosphere, but many similarities still remain.

This image was presented on October 4 at the 2011 EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting in Nantes, France, by researcher Stephane Le Mouelic from the University of Nantes. The mosaic is made up of numerous images collected by the NASA Cassini orbiter over the past 6 years.

The amount of effort that scientists put into creating this image is mind-boggling. Titan's surface is invisible from orbit, hidden under a thick atmospheric veil. Only radar can detect features hidden beneath the massive clouds.

Most of the images used to create this mosaic were collected by Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), over the course of about 70 flybys carried out around the moon, Universe Today reports.