This view of Titan reveals structure in the moon's complex atmosphere. The
geometry of the Cassini spacecraft's view of Titan during this flyby was
similar to that of Voyager 1's pass in 1980.
The image was taken in visible violet light and shows the detached high
haze layer that envelops Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across),
with additional complexity to its structure in the far north. Some of this
atmospheric structure is also visible in a color view (see PIA07700) taken at about
the same time.
The image was taken in visible violet light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Dec. 26, 2005, at a distance of approximately 194,000
kilometers (121,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 29 degrees. The image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
