- Original Caption Released with Image:
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Through the obscuring haze come glimpses of Titan's dune seas.
The dark, equatorial region known as Shangri-la is visible here. Cassini
radar images show that Shangri-la and other dark regions around the moon's
middle are filled with vast stretches of parallel dunes (see PIA07785). These
regions appear to be lowland areas surrounded by brighter, higher terrain.
Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Titan (5,150
kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North is up and rotated 21 degrees to
the right.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Oct. 19, 2007 using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to
wavelengths of polarized infrared light centered at 746 and 938
nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million
kilometers (851,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 80 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.
- Image Credit:
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NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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