Looking toward high northern latitudes on Titan, the Cassini spacecraft
spies a banded pattern encircling the pole. This sort of feature is what
scientists expect to see in the stratosphere of Titan, where the
atmosphere is superrotating, or moving around the moon faster than the
moon itself rotates.
Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken by the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 28, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 196,000 kilometers (122,000 miles) from Titan. Image scale
is 12 kilometers (7 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.