A hazy orb hangs in space, swathed in its dense cocoon of frigid
atmosphere. Titan's global, detached, high-altitude haze layer is visible
here. Also visible is Titan's enigmatic polar hood, which hangs over the
polar regions of the moon's northern hemisphere. Scientists will track
changes in this feature as winter in Titan's northern hemisphere advances
to spring.
Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 4.5 million kilometers (2.8 million miles) from Titan and
at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is
27 kilometers (17 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 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.