Cassini's "eyes" -- its powerful imaging cameras -- bear witness to the
majestic and spectacular sights of the Saturn system, as this views
attests. Here, the probe gazes upon Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200
miles across) in the distance beyond Saturn and its dark and graceful
rings.
This view was taken from above the ringplane and looks toward the unlit
side of the rings.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The image was obtained using
the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 10, 2006 at a distance
of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn
and 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Titan. The image was
taken at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 149 degrees. Image
scale is 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Saturn.
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.
