Bright side of the 'moon'

 
Published: Saturday 31 July 2004

-- (Credit: NASA)An image of the resource-rich southern hemisphere of Saturn's planet-sized moon, Titan, picked up by visible and infrared spectrometers aboard the Cassini spacecraft. The circular feature visible in the picture may be a crater. The yellow areas correspond to the hydrocarbon-rich regions, while the green areas are frozen ice. The white colour denotes methane clouds. Cassini, which will drop the 6-tonne Huygens probe on Titan in January 2005, was jointly launched by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, European Space Agency and Italian Space Agency in 1997. It is expected to fly by all major moons of Saturn.

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