Astronomers have had their eyes on Saturn’s largest moon Titan for quite a while now. It seems to hold many elements possible for sustaining life, and the latest discovery only further supports that. Titan has the terrestrial equivalent of salt flats.

Scientists have known for a while that a methane-rich haze surrounds Titan, making it the only moon in our solar system to have a thick atmosphere. NASA’s Cassini orbiter, which has been studying Saturn’s moon, has instruments capable of going through the dense atmosphere to monitor what lies beneath it.

Previously, Cassini was only able to obtain distant and vague views of Titan with its infrared and visual mapping tools. However, in July the orbiter made several flybys, which allowed it to get much better views of the seasonal changes n Titan—also thanks in part to an improved viewing geometry and some acid-rain-free weather.

The instruments have been taking many images, which may have found a key stage into Titan’s water cycle, which puts the moon’s liquid hydrocarbons back into the atmosphere.

“Many of these northern liquid bodies are surrounded by a bright material not seen elsewhere on Titan,” Carolyn Porco, head of the Cassini imaging team, wrote in an email introducing the new pictures on Wednesday. “Is this an indication that with increased warmth, the seas and lakes are starting to evaporate, leaving behind a deposit of organic material … or, in other words, the Titan equivalent of a salt flat?”

Titan has bedrock of ice, which in the images appears greenish. The mysterious material appears orange-red, which leads the scientists to believe it is some organic chemicals. The scientists further theorized that those chemicals had dissolved in pools of methane, which were left behind when the liquid later evaporated.

Organic in these terms refers to anything containing carbon atoms, not that it contains life as we know it. However, scientists are still looking into the potential of Titan for prebiotic chemistry, which was the precursor to life on Earth.

“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,” Barnes said in a NASA news release. “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.”