The Cassini spacecraft looks down on Titan's north pole and unveils the
moon's upper-most atmospheric hazes, creating the appearance of a halo
around Saturn's largest moon.
For a color view of the atmosphere's upper layers from another viewing
geometry, see PIA11468.
Terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Titan (5,150 kilometers,
or 3,200 miles across), which is facing Saturn. This view is centered on
54 degrees north latitude, 251 degrees west longitude. Titan's north pole
lies on the terminator about one-third of the way inward from the top of
the image.
The image was taken in violet light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle
camera on May 21, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 147,000 kilometers (91,000 miles) from Titan and at a
Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 121 degrees. Image scale is 9
kilometers (6 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 operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.