Snapshots of Titan's North Polar Cloud

This series of false-color images obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the dissolving cloud cover over the north pole of Saturn's moon Titan. The images, obtained by Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), cover 2006 to 2009, when Titan was transitioning from northern winter to northern spring. In 2006, the north polar cloud appeared dense and opaque. But in spectrometer images obtained around the 2009 equinox, when the Sun was directly over Saturn and Titan's equators and northern winter was turning into spring, the cloud appeared much thinner and patchier. The dissipating cloud allowed scientists to see the underlying northern lakes and seas, including Kraken Mare. The northern seas and lakes on the surface below, made of liquid hydrocarbons, look like dark jigsaw puzzle pieces in the false-color images.

Scientists colorized the VIMS image by assigning red, green and blue to the parts of the infrared spectrum around 5 micrometers, 2.8 micrometers and 2.03 micrometers, respectively. The images create a kind of time-lapse series from December 28, 2006 to June 6, 2009.

For another view of these images, see PIA15231.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/CNRS/LPGNantes