Piercing the ubiquitous layer of smog enshrouding Titan, these images
from the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer reveals an
exotic surface covered with a variety of materials in the southern
hemisphere.
Using near-infrared colors -- some three times deeper in the red visible
to the human eye -- these images reveal the surface with unusual clarity.
The color image shows a false-color combination of the three previous
images. The yellow areas correspond to the hydrocarbon-rich regions,
while the green areas are the icier regions. Here, the methane cloud
appears white, as it is bright in all three colors.
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 Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer team is
based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For more information about the visual and
infrared mapping spectrometer visit http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu/.