

The Cassini spacecraft, which has been circling Saturn for the past three years, has captured new views of Titan's surface, including the first radar images of what appear to be lakes near the moon's south pole.

Titan is famous for what scientists interpret as liquid hydrocarbon lakes, the only such structures known outside of earth. Scientists believe that the surface of Titan looks a bit like upper Minnesota, with small and large lakes scattered across the landscape. But you wouldn't want to go swimming in them: they're believed to be filled with methane.

"The lakes appear to be in varying states of fullness, suggesting their involvement in a complex hydrologic system akin to Earth's water cycle," said Alex Hayes, a graduate student who studies Cassini radar data at Cal Tech.

Scientists have been mapping the northern pole for a year and a half. More than 60% of Titan's northern polar region has now been charted. The southern polar region, on the other hand, had been undiscovered territory. Now

Cassini has sent back the first images of the region, prompting a giddy NASA

scientist to exclaim, "We wanted to see if there are more lakes present there and, sure enough, there they are, three little lakes smiling back at us."

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Meanwhile, in Saturnian Orbit