Cassini pierces Titan's veil of smog

<div class="section0"><div class="Normal"><span style="" font-size:="">PASADENA: The Cassini spacecraft pierced the haze enveloping Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, to reveal surface details that already have shattered theories about its composition, scientists said on Saturday.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Cassini, launched nearly seven years ago by an international team of scientists, became the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn and its rings and moons during an “orbit insertion’’ manoeuvre on Wednesday.The space probe was so flawless during its 2.2 billion-mile journey to Saturn that scientists scrapped an orbit correction planned for Saturday.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">On its first trip past Titan on Thursday, the robotic probe snapped infrared images that left scientists puzzled. “This is the best view of the surface yet and we don’t know what tomake of it,’’ scientist Elizabeth Turtle said at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Black-and-white photos taken at 210,600 miles above Titan’s surface show a murky landscape that Turtle likened to a “melting ice cream sundae’’ with some fuzzy linear structures that could be mountains, rivers or fault lines. That scientists were able to discern features other than circular impact craters suggests that Titan has geologic activity similar to that of Earth, Turtle said.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">“It’s dangerous to interpret a surface we’ve never seen, especially on so little sleep,’’ she said. “But we can’t resist.’’ Meanwhile, scientists will get a better shot at Titan in October, when Cassini descends to 750 miles to snap close-ups of the moon,whose atmosphere and soil resemble those of primordial Earth and may contain the building blocks of life.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Scientists had believed that bright patches on Titan’s surface seen in earlier observations were pure water ice. But the first infrared images taken by Cassini revealed water ice as dark patches because it is mixed with “flotsam and jetsam’’ that may be organic material that rained onto the surface.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">The infrared mapping of some two per cent of Titan’s surface did not reveal what scientists hoped for bright flashes denoting liquid on Titan’s otherwise frozen surface. </span><span style="" font-size:="" font-style:="" italic="">(NYT News Service)</span></div> </div>