Cassini peers around the hazy limb of Titan to spy the sunlit south pole
of Saturn in the distance beyond.
The thick, smog-like atmosphere of frigid Titan is a major source of
interest for the Cassini mission. The moon 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 image was taken with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 26, 2005, at a distance of
approximately 26,000 kilometers (16,000 miles) from Titan. Image scale is
1 kilometer (4,643 feet) 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.