Surprisingly for everyone, the space agency NASA has provided another, final photo of the Cassini space probe. Before it was deliberately immersed in Saturn's atmosphere to remain there forever, the probe took a detailed photograph of the landscape of the gas giant's satellite, Titan. This is a photograph of the satellite's North Pole, which clearly shows the mysterious lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane.
The so-called Punga Mare Sea (390 kilometers wide) is directly above the center of the image, while the Ligeia Mare (500 kilometers wide) is below the center, and the vast Kraken Mare Sea stretches for 1200 kilometers on the left side of the photo. Around the seas, numerous small Titan lakes can be seen, which are scattered on the right side of the image. The nature of these lakes is still a mystery to scientists.
Another blatant mystery is the weather on Titan. Given the dense atmosphere, Titan has a methane cycle very similar to the water evaporation cycle on Earth, with cloud formation, precipitation, surface runoff into rivers, and collection of water in lakes and seas. During the southern summer of Titan, 'Cassini' observed cloud activity over the satellite's south pole.
However, photographs of the northern hemisphere during spring on Titan are strikingly different from this one, which shows only a few small clouds. They look brighter than the dash just below the center of the panel, as well as slightly above the Ligeia Mare.
“We expected more symmetry between southern and northern summers,” said Elizabeth (Zibi) a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and a member of the Cassini control team (ISS) who captured the image. 'In fact, atmospheric models predicted the existence of summer clouds over northern latitudes several years ago. So the fact that they still haven't appeared before the end of the mission points to something interesting about Titan's methane cycle and its weather. '
