SUMMARY: Only days after arriving at Saturn, Cassini made its first flyby of Titan, the planet's largest moon. The spacecraft only got as close as 339,000 km (210,600 miles), but that was enough to reveal surprising new features about the moon's surface. Cassini is equipped with special camera filters that allow it to peer through the thick clouds that obscure most wavelengths of light. Darker regions seem to be made up of water ice, while the lighter regions are a mixture of ice and hydrocarbons. Cassini is scheduled to make 45 flybys of Titan, getting as close as 950 km (590 miles), so the view will only get better.

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