This image shows Titan, Saturn's largest moon (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200
miles, across), with a streak-like cloud near its south pole. The cloud
may be part of a region of polar clouds seen during Cassini's first flyby
of Titan in July 2004, only now covering a larger area.
Titan's atmosphere, like that of Earth, is mostly nitrogen. The pressure
at Titan's surface is 50 percent higher than on Earth, despite its lower
gravity, meaning that the mass of the atmosphere per unit area is more
than ten times that on Earth.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Sept. 23, 2004, at a distance of 7.1 million kilometers
(4.4 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 84 degrees. The image scale is 42 kilometers (26 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 Cassini-Huygens 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.
