Description	Piercing through clouds of smog, the Cassini spacecraft has captured the best images ever of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Exploring Titan is a major focus of Cassini's overall mission. Cassini used its visible and infrared mapping spectrometer to take the unprecedented images. Designed to map chemical and mineral deposits, the camera is also quite good at cutting through haze and clouds. Below the dense atmosphere, Titan's surface appears to be made up of hydrocarbon-rich regions and icy areas. Scientists suspect that frozen in the ice may be the very same chemical compounds that possibly led to life here on Earth. Cassini took these first images of Titan from a distance of over two hundred thousand miles. However, future flybys will bring the craft as close as 590 miles.
Date	Taken
Source	commons.wikimedia.org
Author	NASA Kennedy Space Center

KSC-04-S-00236 (ksc 071304 ctitan)

Summary