This image of Titan's night side was taken during Cassini's very close
flyby of the smoggy moon on Feb. 15, 2005.
The image shows Titan's thick atmosphere illuminated from behind by
sunlight. A detached haze layer is visible over the entire globe. The
haze layer over the north polar region (at the top) has an unusual
structure, a feature that imaging scientists have noticed in earlier
flybys but do not yet fully understand.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera through
a filter sensitive to wavelengths of visible blue light centered at 460
nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 134,000
kilometers (83,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 158 degrees. Resolution in the image is about 8 kilometers
(5 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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.