Titan's murky atmosphere shines as a halo of scattered light.
Prior to the Cassini spacecraft's arrival, Titan remained incognito,
swathed in its impenetrable envelope of frigid gases. Now, gradually but
relentlessly, the veil continues to fall away under Cassini's gaze,
bringing the wonders of this world into view.
North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The image was acquired with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 10, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 3.1 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Titan and at
a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 165 degrees. Image scale is 18
kilometers (11 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.
