Titan's featureless atmosphere as seen in visible light glares back at
the viewer, challenging Cassini and its piggybacked Huygens probe to
expose the moon's many secrets. The Huygens probe, built by the European
Space Agency, along with Cassini's powerful cameras, will soon penetrate
the thick atmospheric haze which enshrouds this moon, which is about the
size of Mercury.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on May 23, 2004, from a distance of 21.6 million kilometers
(13.4 million miles) from Titan. The image scale is 129 kilometers (80
miles) per pixel. The image was magnified to aid visibility.
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 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.