English: Cassini peers through the murky orange haze of Titan to spy what are believed to be bodies of liquid hydrocarbons, two of them as large as seas on Earth, near the moon's north pole. The image combines a near natural-color view and an infrared glimpse of Titan's surface obtained by the visual cameras with a transition to imagery collected by the radar instrument aboard Cassini, for a dramatic reveal of the north pole of Saturn's largest moon.

The most readily visible bodies are outlined in blue. The largest of these, on the bottom, is as big as the Caspian Sea on Earth; the next largest, on the right, is about the size of Lake Superior. When compared to the surface area of Titan however (which is six times smaller than Earth's), these bodies are equivalent in size to the Bay of Bengal and Timor Sea, respectively. Geographically speaking, they are more like seas. It is clear that one of the radar swaths has intersected a small upper bay of the largest sea, and has almost entirely imaged the second one.

The extreme darkness of these regions in the radar data argues strongly for the presence of liquid hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane, which remain liquid at Titan's frigid temperature of minus 180 degrees Celsius (minus 288 degrees Fahrenheit). See PIA09182.

The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 25, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Titan. The infrared images were taken with a special filter centered at 938 nanometers that provides the cameras' best view of Titan's surface features. This view was then composited with images taken at 619, 568 and 440 nanometers to create a near natural color appearance. The radar data were acquired in synthetic aperture radar mode.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

The original NASA image has been cropped to center Jingpo Lacus.