These images of Titan's south polar region were acquired during Cassini's
first distant encounter with the smog-enshrouded moon on July 2, 2004. The
spacecraft approached Titan at a distance of about 340,000 kilometers
(211,000 miles) during this flyby.
This montage contains pairs of close-up images, with the original images
(at left) and also versions in which some of the narrow, dark, curvilinear
and rectilinear surface features have been traced by red lines (at right).
These dark features may be examples of surface channels and deeper crustal
structures such as faults. The longest features (in the third and fourth
pairs from the top) extend for as much as 1,500 kilometers (930 miles)
across the surface and are as narrow as 10 kilometers (6 miles) across. At
the bottom left, a single frame shows a small, dark, circular feature,
which could be an impact crater. For reference, the white bar at the
bottom right is a 1,000-kilometers-long (620 mile) scale bar.
A large mosaic of this region and the source of the images in this montage
is also available (see PIA06203).
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.