Cassini final view of Titan's northern lakes and seas

During the last distant encounter of NASA's Cassini mission with Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, the spacecraft captured the northern polar landscape of the lakes and seas of the enigmatic, methane-filled moon and moon. ethane.

They were captured on September 11, 2017. Four days later, Cassini was deliberately immersed in Saturn's atmosphere.

Punga Mare (390 miles, or 390 kilometers in diameter) is visible just above the center of the mosaic, with Ligeia Mare (300 miles or 500 kilometers wide) under the center and the vast Kraken Mare that extends 1200 kilometers to the left of the mosaic. Many small Titan lakes can be seen around the seas and scattered on the right side of the mosaic. Among the current mysteries concerning Titan, there is the formation of these lakes.

Another mystery to Titan was the weather. With its dense atmosphere, Titan has a methane cycle that closely resembles the Earth's water cycle, namely evaporation, cloud formation, precipitation, surface flow in rivers and collection in lakes and seas. During Titan's austral summer, Cassini observed a cloudy activity over the South Pole.

However, typical of northern spring and summer observations, the view reveals only a few small clouds. They appear as bright lines just below the center of the mosaic, including a few above Ligeia Mare.

"We were expecting more symmetry between south and north of summer," said Elizabeth ("Zibi") Johns Hopkins's Turtle Applied Physics Lab and the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem team. Science. "In fact, atmospheric models predicted summer clouds over northern latitudes several years ago, and the fact that they have not yet appeared before the end of the mission tells us interesting thing about the cycle and methane weather of Titan. "

"Titan is a fascinating place that fascinates us with some of its mysteries," said Turtle.

The images of this mosaic were taken with the narrow-angle camera of the ISS, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers.

The view was obtained at a distance of about 140,000 kilometers from Titan. The scale of the image is about 800 meters per pixel. The image is an orthographic projection centered on 67.19 degrees north latitude and 212.67 degrees west longitude. An orthographic view most closely resembles the view seen by a distant observer looking through a telescope.

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Image: Cloud activity returns to Titan's northern latitudes