would be a way to coordinate better, especially on the congressional side," says Washington. "Our greatest worry is the implementation in a somewhat hostile political environment. It's going to be awfully hard."

USGCRP principals are "very pleased with the NRC report," says Timothy Killeen, assistant director in the Directorate for Geosciences at the National Science Foundation and the USGCRP vice chair who led development of the strategic plan. "We do recognize there are some gaps in our capacity." Coordinators plan to bring in more expertise from USGCRP agencies and nonmember agencies, academia, and state agencies, says Thomas Armstrong, executive director of USGCRP. Interagency working groups are also being formed that include program managers and scientific experts "who know the science and can write the checks," says Armstrong. The finalSAN FRANCISCO—NASA’s Cassini probe has snapped the first images of sunlight reflected off one of the hydrocarbon lakes at Saturn's moon Titan. Although the existence of liquid lakes there had already been confirmed by other means, this was a long-sought direct visual confirmation. Cassini scientists presented the images here Friday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.



"It was a little bit of luck," says Katrin Stephan of the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, who was the first person to spot the glint while browsing newly arrived infrared images. (Titan's atmosphere is too hazy for the lakes to be seen in the visible-light spectrum.) Cassini took the shots on July 8 from a distance of 200,000 kilometers, as it hurtled toward Titan for a flyby. Three out of