Titan's equatorial latitudes are distinctly different in character from
its south polar region, as this image shows.
The dark terrain, presumably lowland, seen here does not extend much
farther south than about 30 degrees South. The successful Huygens probe
landed in such a region. The Huygens probe is rotating into the light
here, seeing the dawn of a new day.
The bright region toward the right side of Titan's disk is Xanadu. This
area is thought to consist of upland terrain that is relatively
uncontaminated by the dark material that fills the lowland regions.
Near the moon's south pole, and just eastward of the terminator, is the
dark feature identified by imaging scientists as the best candidate (so
far) for a past or present hydrocarbon lake on Titan (see PIA06241).
Farther east of the lake-like feature, bright clouds arc around the pole.
These clouds occupy a latitude range that is consistent with
previously-seen convective cloud activity on Titan.
Titan is Saturn's largest moon, at 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
July 7, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers
(800,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 60 degrees. The image was obtained using a filter sensitive to
wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The image scale
is 7 kilometers (5 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 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.
