EU: The international spacecraft Cassini began beaming close-up images of Saturn's giant moon Titan to Earth yesterday.
Cassini reached the point of closest approach of 745 miles (1199 kilometres) and transmitted the material back to NASA's deep space network antenna in Madrid.
The first image was a low-resolution scene of a portion of Titan's disk covered in the now familiar hydrocarbon haze. One of the images showed distinct dark and light areas of the surface.
"It takes a bit of processing to bring out features," said imaging team leader Carolyn Porco.
Cassini turned its cameras and instruments toward the cloud-shrouded moon in the closest flyby since it began orbiting Saturn on June 30th last as scientists endeavour to see whether Titan has oceans or seas of liquid methane and ethane.
"For those of us who have been studying Titan ... it's very tantalising to say maybe those bright regions are higher icy regions that are popping up out of a dark slushy area, or maybe that's lava that's flowed and covered up some of the terrain and is forming the sharp shoreline-looking boundary," Ms Porco said.
The spacecraft will make 45 flybys of the moon, coming within 600 miles of Titan at times. The spacecraft also carries a probe that will be released on December 24th and which plunges into Titan's atmosphere next January, radioing pictures and science data back to Cassini as it descends under a parachute. Saturn has 33 known moons, including two little ones that were spotted in pictures taken by Cassini in June of this year.
Titan, which is bigger than the planet Mercury, has an atmosphere 1 .5 times as dense as Earth's and contains organic - meaning carbon-based - compounds.
Scientists believe those compounds could be much like those on Earth billions of years ago before life began. Life, however, is unlikely on Titan because it is so cold. - (AP)