SAN FRANCISCO – A glint of light from a large lake confirms the presence of surface liquid in Titan's northern hemisphere. This image, released Thursday here at the American Geophysical Union meeting, was captured on July 8, using the Cassini spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer.

"This one image communicates so much about Titan – thick atmosphere, surface lakes and an otherworldliness," said Cassini project scientist Bob Pappalardo, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a press release. "It's an unsettling combination of strangeness yet similarity to Earth."

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has a dense nitrogenous atmosphere and is the only place, other than earth, containing stable pools of liquid on its surface. In 2008, Cassini confirmed liquid methane lakes in Titan's southern hemisphere using infrared data.

Cassini has been looking for this mystical glint since reaching Saturn in 2004, but winter had shrouded the northern half of Titan. The sun began shining on this area, which contains more lakes than the southern hemisphere, in August 2009 during the moon's spring equinox.

The glint comes from the southern shoreline of the sprawling Kraken Mare lake, which covers about 400,000 square kilometers of Titan's surface. The image proves the lake has been stable for at least three years, indicating that Titan cycles liquid methane to its surface, said Ralf Jaumann, Cassini team member at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, Germany.

"These results remind us how unique Titan is in the solar system," Jaumann said in a press release. "But they also show us that liquid has a universal power to shape geological surfaces in the same way, no matter what the liquid is."

Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/DLR

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