Titan's hazy orange globe hangs before the Cassini spacecraft, partly
illuminated -- a world with many mysteries yet to be uncovered.
North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up and rotated
30 degrees to the right. The moon's north pole tilts slightly away from
the spacecraft here.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 5, 2008. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 213,000 kilometers (133,000 miles) from Titan
and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 128 degrees. Image scale
is 13 kilometers (8 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 .