High-altitude haze and perhaps cloud layers are visible in this imaging
science subsystem image acquired on Oct. 24, 2004, as the Cassini
spacecraft neared its first close encounter with Titan. The image was
captured at a distance of about one million kilometers (620,000 miles)
using a near-ultraviolet filter, which is sensitive to scattering by
small particles.
The Sun preferentially illuminates the southern hemisphere at this time
of year, and the northern day-night terminator is visible at the upper
boundary. The well-known global detached haze layer, hundreds of
kilometers or miles above Titan's surface, is visible as a thin bright
ring around the entire planet. This layer is produced by photochemical
reactions.
At the northern high-latitude edge of the image, additional striations
are visible, caused by particulates that are at a high enough altitude to
be illuminated by the Sun near the horizon despite the surface below
being in darkness. These striations may simply be caused by wave
perturbations propagating through the detached haze, or they may be
evidence of additional regional haze or cloud layers not present at other
latitudes.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.
