Nasa has captured a stunning image of light reflection in the northern hemisphere of Titan, the largest moon of the planet Saturn, illustrating the presence of surface liquid on the planetary body.

The image, taken by the Cassini Spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer on July 8, is the first of its kind.

Scientists had previously discovered lakes of surface liquid in the moon's southern hemisphere using infrared. It makes Titan the only other body besides Earth believed to harbour liquid on its surface.

Known as a specular reflection, the glint of light has been the focus of Cassini's mission since the craft made contact with Saturn in 2004. However, Titan's northern hemisphere has been shrouded in winter darkness for much of that time.

Titanic discovery: The glint, shown at the very top of the image, is captured for the first time

Sun only began to directly illuminate the northern lakes, which considerably outnumber the amount found in the southern hemisphere, during the moon's spring equinox in August this year.

'This one image communicates so much about Titan - thick atmosphere, surface lakes and an otherworldliness,' said Cassini project scientist Bob Pappalardo in a press release. 'It’s an unsettling combination of strangeness yet similarity to Earth.'

The glint comes from the southern shoreline of the sprawling Kraken Mare lake, which covers about 400,000 square kilometers of Titan’s surface.

Cassini team member, Ralf Jaumann, added: 'These results remind us how unique Titan is in the solar system. But they also show us that liquid has a universal power to shape geological surfaces in the same way, no matter what the liquid is.'

'Next, we want to find out more about Titan's liquid. Do we have some kind of weather there? Do we have changes with seasons? Does it rain? How does the liquid methane run across the surface?'

Scientists have been captivated by Titan for many years with the belief that its rich carbon atmosphere is similar to that found on our planet in its youth.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the smallest object ever seen in visible light in the Kuiper Belt, a vast ring of icy debris that is encircling the outer rim of the solar system just beyond Neptune.

The needle-in-a-haystack object found by Hubble is only 3,200 feet across and a whopping 4.2 billion miles away. The smallest Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) seen previously in reflected light is roughly 30 miles across, or 50 times larger.

This is the first observational evidence for a population of comet-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt that are being ground down through collisions. The Kuiper Belt is therefore collisionally evolving, meaning that the region's icy content has been modified over the past 4.5 billion years.

The object detected by Hubble is so faint - at 35th magnitude -- it is 100 times dimmer than what the Hubble can see directly.

So then how did the space telescope uncover such a small body?

In a paper published in the December 17th issue of the journal Nature, Hilke Schlichting of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and her collaborators are reporting that the telltale signature of the small vagabond was extracted from Hubble's pointing data, not by direct imaging.

Hubble has three optical instruments called Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS). The FGSs provide high-precision navigational information to the space observatory's attitude control systems by looking at select guide stars for pointing. The sensors exploit the wavelike nature of light to make precise measurement of the location of stars.

Schlichting and her co-investigators determined that the FGS instruments are so good that they can see the effects of a small object passing in front of a star. This would cause a brief occultation and diffraction signature in the FGS data as the light from the background guide star was bent around the intervening foreground KBO.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Space shuttle Endeavour and its solid rocket boosters will be powered down and prepared for their move, or rollout, to Launch Pad 39A scheduled for early January 2010.

The six STS-130 mission astronauts will carry out a variety of administrative duties this morning at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Commander George Zamka and Pilot Terry Virts also will practice shuttle landing techniques in T-38 jets and NASA's Shuttle Training Aircraft.