The murky orange disk of Saturn's moon Titan glides past -- a silent,
floating sphere transiting Saturn.
Titan's photochemical smog completely obscures the surface in such natural
color views. Its high-altitude hazes are visible against the disk of
Saturn as they attenuate the light reflected by the planet.
Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3200 miles) across. The view was acquired from
less than a degree above Saturn's ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2007, at a distance of
approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Titan. Image
scale is 15 kilometers (9 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.