Saturn's large, smog-enshrouded moon Titan greets Cassini in full color
as the spacecraft makes its third close pass on Feb. 15, 2005.
This view has been rotated so that north on Titan is up. There is a
slight difference in brightness from north to south, a seasonal effect
that was noted in NASA's Voyager spacecraft images, and is clearly
visible in some infrared images from Cassini (see PIA06121). The
northern polar region is largely in darkness at this time.
This image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera
through using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The image was acquired at a distance
of approximately 229,000 kilometers (142,000 miles) from Titan and at
a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 20 degrees. Resolution in the
image is about 14 kilometers (9 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.
