Reflection of Sunlight off Titan Lake
NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft has captured the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan, confirming the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, lake-shaped basins. The glint off a mirror-like surface is known as a specular reflection.
This kind of glint was detected by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on July 8, 2009. It confirmed the presence of liquid in the moon’s northern hemisphere, where lakes are more numerous and larger than those in the southern hemisphere.
“I was instantly excited because the glint reminded me of an image of our own planet taken from orbit around Earth, showing a reflection of sunlight on an ocean,” said Katrin Stephan, a Cassini scientist at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin. “But we also had to do more work to make sure the glint we were seeing wasn’t lightning or an erupting volcano.”
