This Cassini spacecraft image affords a view of Titan's south polar
region, an area home to one of Titan's hydrocarbon "lake districts."
Titan's south pole is illuminated to the right of the terminator near the
bottom of the visible disk. The dark area near the bottom, in Titan's
mid-southern latitudes, is Mezzoramia. The wider, darker region near the
equator is named Senkyo. A "lake district" (see PIA11147) containing what
scientists believe are lakes of hydrocarbons has been found surrounding
Titan's south pole.
Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Titan (5,150
kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North on Titan is up and rotated 27
degrees to the right. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 15, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to
wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view
was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers
(746,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 55 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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.