This natural color composite was taken during the Cassini spacecraft's
April 16, 2005, flyby of Titan. It is a combination of images taken
through three filters that are sensitive to red, green and violet light.
It shows approximately what Titan would look like to the human eye: a
hazy orange globe surrounded by a tenuous, bluish haze. The orange color
is due to the hydrocarbon particles which make up Titan's atmospheric
haze. This obscuring haze was particularly frustrating for planetary
scientists following the NASA Voyager mission encounters in 1980-81.
Fortunately, Cassini is able to pierce Titan's veil at infrared
wavelengths (see PIA06228).
North on Titan is up and tilted 30 degrees to the right.
The images to create this composite were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide angle camera on April 16, 2005, at distances ranging
from approximately 173,000 to 168,200 kilometers (107,500 to 104,500
miles) from Titan and from a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 56
degrees. Resolution in the images is approximately 10 kilometers 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
