UPDATE: The Saturnian moon of Titan will continue to lure planetary scientists into further research this month with two planned encounter flybys by the Cassini spacecraft now in orbit around the ringed planet. The flybys scheduled for December 12 and 28 will advance the climate research being conducted into the polar lakes and/or seasonal change detection on Titan.
A recent NASA-commissioned study indicates that the eccentricity of Saturn's orbit might have produced the unusually uneven pattern of lakes over the polar regions of Saturn's largest moon. Saturn's oblong orbit around the sun exposes different parts of Titan to different amounts of sunlight, which affect cycles of precipitation and evaporation in the polar regions.
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