14 DAY TRIAL // The spacecraft Cassini has just sent in clear photos of a sea on Saturn's moon, Titan, captured during the latest flyby. Also visible in the images are various features characteristic of a coastline, like channels, islands and bays.
Cassini-Huygens is a space mission consisting of two main elements: the NASA Cassini orbiter, named after the Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini and the ESA Huygens probe, named after the Dutch astronomer, mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens, currently studying the planet Saturn and its moons.
Titan is Saturn's largest moon and the second largest in the solar system. The sea on its surface looks like an ordinary body of water on Earth, except it's made of a combination of methane and ethane. It appeared very dark on the radar images taken by Cassini, which suggests that the depth of the liquid here exceeds tens of meters (tens of yards).
An interesting feature are the isolated islands, oriented in the same direction as the peninsula to their lower right, which makes astronomers think they could be part of a mountain ridge, flooded in time. The situation can be found back on Earth, where Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California, suffered the same process.
The new image presents a region of Titan 70 degrees north latitude and 310 west longitude, having a surface of 160 kilometers (100 miles) by 270 kilometers (170 miles). Titan is the only moon in our solar system to have a dense atmosphere and until recently, this made it very hard to observe and understand the surface of the satellite.
So far, only the Cassini-Huygens mission has truly been able to study the surface formations allowing astronomers to receive clearer and more revealing information about what lies beneath the clouds.
This is not the first picture of a liquid body on Titan, as the same space probe discovered liquid hydrocarbon lakes near its north pole, the only large, stable bodies of surface liquid known to exist anywhere, except for Earth.
