Like an ancient mariner charting the coastline of an unexplored
wilderness, Cassini's repeated encounters with Titan are turning a
mysterious world into a more familiar place.
During a Titan flyby on Oct. 28, 2005, the spacecraft's narrow-angle
camera acquired multiple images that were combined to create the mosaic
presented here. Provisional names applied to Titan's features are shown;
an unannotated version of the mosaic is also available (see PIA07754).
The mosaic is a high resolution close-up of two contrasting regions: dark
Shangri-La and bright Xanadu. This view has a resolution of 1 kilometer
(0.6 mile) per pixel and is centered at 2.5 degrees north latitude, 145
degrees west longitude, near the feature called Santorini Facula. The
mosaic is composed of 10 images obtained on Oct. 28, 2005, each processed
to enhance surface detail. It is an orthographic projection, rotated so
that north on Titan is up.
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.
