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Lakes on Titan
During Cassini's 59th flyby of Titan, the spacecraft captured this flash of sunlight (arrow). Reflected off a hydrocarbon lake, it confirms the presence of liquid in the moon's northern hemisphere. For nearly 15 years, the northern hemisphere has been shrouded in darkness. With the approach of the 2009 spring equinox, the sun began to illuminate the area, revealing the lake.
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all of the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth. Like water on Earth, these organic compounds seem to rain down from the sky. Having mapped about 20 percent of the moon's surface, Cassini has already discovered several hundred lakes.
Image courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/University of Arizona/DLR
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LRO Spies Apollo 17 landing Site
Launched in June 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will spend at least a year in lunar orbit, gathering data for future missions. One of its seven scientific instruments is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). Capable of imaging features less than a meter in size, LROC will help locate future landing sites and perform detailed mapping of the Moon’s surface.
In mid-September, LROC captured this detailed view of the Apollo 17 landing site. Craters “Rudolph” and “Poppie” were used as reference points during the landing of the lunar module Challenger in December 1972. Tracks left by the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) lead to where the astronauts set up the Surface Electrical Properties (SEP) experiment and the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). Geophone Rock is a 12-foot-high boulder named after the geophone instruments laid out from the ALSEP.
Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University
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MRO Discovers Ice in Craters
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has discovered subsurface deposits of ice on Mars. Images taken by MRO’s high-resolution imager HiRISE (left), reveal bright ice (light blue to white) in craters excavated by meteorite impacts. Images taken months later (right), show that either all or some of the exposed ice have vaporized.
Image courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech/Cornell University
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