The veil over Titan is slowly being peeled away.  The above radar image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft reveals a flow-like pattern that may explain the craterless surface on Saturn’s largest moon.

The new feature, which was observed on Oct. 26 during a Titan flyby, could have been caused by erosion, explained Cassini radar team member Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona.

"But it looks very much like it's something that oozed across the surface,” he said. “It may be some sort of 'cryovolcanic' flow, an analog to volcanism on Earth that is not molten rock but, at Titan's very cold temperatures, molten ice."
 

The area shown in the image is 90 square miles (230 square kilometers) and is centered at 45 degrees north, 30 degrees west on the moon’s surface.  The smallest details seen on the image are around 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) across.  Bright spots are places where radar signals bounced back to the spacecraft.

This image is part of the first radar survey of Titan.  Flying 1,600 miles (2,500 kilometers) above the surface, Cassini’s instruments pierced through the moon’s thick, hazy atmosphere.  The surface, one percent of which was mapped by the survey, appears to have been shaped by recent geologic activity.

-- Space.com Staff 

Credit: NASA/JPL