NASA spacecraft captures extremely rare image from Saturn’s moon

NASA spacecraft captures extremely rare image from Saturn’s moon

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captures a majestic view of the sun reflecting off polar seas of Titan.

A near infrared, color mosaic photo recently captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft reveals a stunning image of the sun reflecting off the northern polar seas of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the sunglint, which is also known as a specular reflection, was so bright that it saturated the detector of Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument, which captured the image.

The sunglint seen in the photo is also at the highest observation elevation observed so far, with the sun a full 40 degrees above the horizon as seen from Kraken Mare, Titan’s largest sea. This is significantly higher than the 22 degrees seen in a previously captured image, PIA18433, and because the sunglint was so bright, it was visible through the haze at wavelengths as low as 1.3 microns.

CNET reports that there’s more to the picture than a spectacular view, however. The image shows bright methane clouds near the north pole of Titan, which could be actively refilling the lakes with rainfall. Additionally, Kraken Mare appears to have what NASA describes as a “bathrub ring” around it, signifying that the process of evaporation may have caused the sea to slowly decrease in size.

According to NASA’s JPL: “The view contains real color information, although it is not the natural color the human eye would see. Here, red in the image corresponds to 5.0 microns, green to 2.0 microns, and blue to 1.3 microns. These wavelengths correspond to atmospheric windows through which Titan’s surface is visible. The unaided human eye would see nothing but haze, as in PIA12528.”

The image was captured during Cassini’s flyby of Titan, also known as “T104” by the Cassini team, on Aug. 21, 2014.

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