Cassini airs first images of Saturn's moon

The US-European spacecraft Cassini has begun beaming close-up images of Saturn's giant moon Titan.

The US-European spacecraft Cassini has begun beaming close-up images of Saturn's giant moon Titan to Earth.

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Cassini reached the point of closest approach, 1,198 km, at 10.14 pm IST on Tuesday and transmitted to NASA's deep space network antenna in Madrid, Spain, a little under nine hours later.

The first image was a low-resolution scene of part of Titan's disk covered in hydrocarbon haze. "It takes a bit of processing to bring out features," said imaging team leader Carolyn Porco.

There was concern that bad weather in Spain might interfere with some of the night-long data transmissions.

Cassini turned its cameras and instruments towards the cloud-shrouded moon in its closest flyby since it began orbiting Saturn on June 30. Scientists want to see whether Titan has oceans or seas of liquid methane and ethane.

All together, the spacecraft will make 45 fly-bys of the moon, coming within 970 km of Titan at times. The spacecraft also carries a probe that will be released on Dec 24 and plunge into Titan's atmosphere in January, radioing pictures and science data back to Cassini as it descends under a parachute.