Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan displays a surprisingly flattened-looking
north pole in this Cassini image. The cause of this flattening is not
presently known. Titan's diameter is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles).
A hint of the bright, streak-like clouds seen intermittently in Cassini
images of the south polar region is faintly visible at the bottom of the
image.
This view was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow angle camera on Nov. 1, 2004, at a distance of approximately 2.9
million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Titan and at a
Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 99 degrees. The image scale is
17 kilometers (10.6 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 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.