This map of Titan's surface illustrates the regions that will be imaged by
Cassini during the spacecraft's close flyby of Titan on Sept. 7, 2005. At
closest approach, the spacecraft is expected to pass approximately 1,075
kilometers (670 miles) above the moon's surface. This is Cassini's eighth
flyby of Titan out of 45 flybys planned in the four-year tour.
The colored lines delineate the regions that will be imaged at differing
resolutions.
Zooming-in closer to Titan than during its previous pass two weeks
earlier, Cassini camera coverage again focuses on the region known
informally as "the H." Some of the narrow-angle camera images Cassini
takes during this close flyby will be composited into high-resolution
mosaics, similar to PIA06222.
This encounter also should provide an excellent view of Bazaruto Facula
and its central 80-kilometer-wide (50-mile) crater, seen in PIA06234.
The map shows only brightness variations on Titan's surface (the
illumination is such that there are no shadows and no shading due to
topographic variations). Previous observations indicate that due to
Titan's thick, hazy atmosphere, the sizes of surface features that can
be resolved are a few to five times larger than the actual pixel scale
labeled on the map.
The images for this global map were obtained using a narrow band filter
centered at 938 nanometers - a near-infrared wavelength (invisible to the
human eye) at which light can penetrate Titan's atmosphere to reach the
surface and return through the atmosphere to be detected by the camera.
The images have been processed to enhance surface details.
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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
