Snapshots of Titan's North Polar Cloud This series of false-
color images obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the
dissolving cloud cover over the north pole of Saturn's moon
Titan. The images, obtained by Cassini's visual and infrared
mapping spectrometer (VIMS), cover 2006 to 2009, when Titan was
transitioning from northern winter to northern spring. In 2006,
the north polar cloud appeared dense and opaque. But in
spectrometer images obtained around the 2009 equinox, when the
sun was directly over Saturn and Titan's equators and northern
winter was turning into spring, the cloud appeared much thinner
and patchier. The dissipating cloud allowed scientists to see
the underlying northern lakes and seas, including Kraken Mare.
The northern seas and lakes on the surface below, made of liquid
hydrocarbons, look like dark jigsaw puzzle pieces in the false-
color images. Scientists colorized the VIMS image by assigning
red, green and blue to the parts of the infrared spectrum around
5 micrometers, 2.8 micromet