Titan's Surface Revealed

Piercing the ubiquitous layer of smog enshrouding Titan, these images from the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer reveals an exotic surface covered with a variety of materials in the southern hemisphere. Visible is a circular feature that may be a crater in the north. Using near-infrared colors--some three times deeper in the red visible to the human eye--these images reveal the surface with unusual clarity. The color image shows a false-color combination of three previous images. The yellow areas correspond to the hydrocarbon-rich regions, while the green areas are the icier regions. Here, the methane cloud appears white, as it is bright in all three colors.