A new image of Titan taken by Cassini provides a closer, clearer view of
an interesting bright feature surrounded by darker material.
During the two most recent flybys of Titan, on March 31 and April 16,
2005, Cassini captured a number of images of the hemisphere of Titan that
faces Saturn. The image at the left is taken from a mosaic of images
obtained in March 2005 (see PIA06222) and shows the location of the new image
at the right. The image at the right shows an intriguing bright spot as
well as the southern boundary of the dark terrain that dominates the
equatorial region of this hemisphere of Titan.
The 80-kilometer-wide (50-mile) bright spot seen in the upper right
portion of the image at the left was first seen in images taken during a
distant encounter with Titan shortly after Cassini's Saturn orbit
insertion burn in July 2004. In images taken in March, this spot was
shown to be roughly circular but new, higher-resolution images like the
one at the right reveal surprisingly angular edges. The angular margins
suggest that they have been influenced by tectonic processes (for example,
faulting). The sharp western margins and more diffuse bright material off
the eastern margin are consistent with bright features seen within dark
terrain in the region of Titan observed during previous flybys late last
year and in February (see PIA06541). The west-east nature of these
features is consistent with "wakes" being formed through wind-driven
activity. It is also worth noting that this bright spot appears to be
partly surrounded by thin, curving tendrils of bright material.
The view at the left consists of five images that have been added
together and enhanced to bring out surface detail and to reduce noise,
although some camera artifacts remain.
These images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera
using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938
nanometers -- considered to be the imaging science subsystem's best
spectral filter for observing the surface of Titan. This view was acquired
from a distance of approximately 43,000 kilometers (26,700 miles). The
pixel scale of this image is 510 meters (0.3 miles) per pixel, although
the actual resolution is likely to be several times larger.
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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.