Titan

Titan is the largest of the moons orbiting Saturn. Until very recently, our view of Titan was much as it is depicted here: a hazy, orange sphere. NASA’s Cassini mission changed all that. Cassini and the Huygens probe it launched into Titan’s surface relayed data back to Earth about the atmosphere and weather it encountered. Revealed (see images below) was a world that looked a lot like home, with surface features like riverbeds, vast deserts covered in dunes, and even lakes filled not with water, but liquid hydrocarbons—much like the fuel we put into our cars! These lakes are the first open bodies of liquid found anywhere besides Earth. Also in the above portrait is one of Saturn’s smaller moons, Tethys. Tethys is thought to be made mostly of water ice. Its dominating surface feature is a giant impact crater called Odysseus Crater, which is two-fifths the diameter of Tethys itself.