Saturn's hazy moon Titan appears to drift above Saturn's ringplane in
this view taken only a tenth of a degree above the rings. Titan's small
orbital inclination is enough to make it appear above the ringplane from
this viewing angle. Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.
The Sun is below the rings in this image, so light that makes it to
Cassini is that which has been diffusely transmitted through the rings.
Thus, the densest parts of the rings appear dark in this image, and the
dusty gaps in the rings, such as the Cassini Division, appear bright.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 25, 2005, at a distance of approximately
3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Titan and at a
Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. The image scale is
19 kilometers (12 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.
