Although the Huygens probe has now pierced the murky skies of Titan and
landed on its surface, much of the moon remains for the Cassini spacecraft
to explore. Titan continues to present exciting puzzles.
This view of Titan uncovers new territory not previously seen at this
resolution by Cassini's cameras. The view is a composite of four nearly
identical wide-angle camera images, all taken using a filter sensitive to
wavelengths of infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The individual
images have been combined and contrast-enhanced in such a way as to
sharpen surface features and enhance overall brightness variations.
Some of the territory in this view was covered by observations made by the
Cassini synthetic aperture radar in October 2004 and February 2005. At
large scales, there are similarities between the views taken by the
imaging science subsystem cameras and the radar results, but there also
are differences.
For example, the center of the floor of the approximately
80-kilometer-wide (50-mile) crater identified by the radar team in
February (near the center in this image, see PIA07368 for the radar image)
is relatively bright at 2.2 centimeters, the wavelength of the radar experiment,
but dark in the near-infrared wavelengths used here by Cassini's optical
cameras. This brightness difference is also apparent for some of the
surrounding material and could indicate differences in surface composition
or roughness.
Such comparisons, as well as information from observations acquired by
the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer at the same time as the
optical camera observations, are important in trying to understand the
nature of Titan's surface materials.
The images for this composite view were taken with the Cassini spacecraft
on March 31, 2005, at distances ranging from approximately 146,000 to
130,000 kilometers (91,000 to 81,000 miles) from Titan and at a
Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 57 degrees. The image
scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. Previous observations indicate
that, due to Titan's thick, hazy atmosphere, the sizes of surface features
that can be resolved are a few times larger than the actual pixel scale.
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.