Less than 20 minutes after Cassini's close approach to Titan on March 31,
2005, its cameras captured this view of Saturn through Titan's upper
atmosphere. The northern part of Saturn's disk can be seen at the upper
left; dark horizontal lines are shadows cast upon Saturn by its rings.
Below this level, Titan's atmosphere is thick enough to obscure Saturn.
The diffuse bright regions of the image (below Saturn and at the right)
are light being scattered by haze in the upper reaches of Titan's
atmosphere.
This image is scientifically useful because it shows properties both of
how Titan's haze transmits light (from the attenuation of light from
Saturn) and of how the haze reflects light (from its brightness next to
Saturn).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera at a distance of 7,980 kilometers (4,960 miles) from
Titan, when Saturn was about 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) away.
Image scale is about 320 meters (1,050 feet) per pixel on Titan.
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.
