Titan's fast-rotating atmosphere creates circumpolar bands in the north.
The Cassini spacecraft acquired this view of the smoggy moon following a
flyby of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) on March 26,
2007.
The image was taken in visible violet light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 275,000 kilometers
(171,000 miles) from Titan. Image scale is 33 kilometers (20 miles) per
pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.