Clouds Over Titan

This image depicts Saturn's moon Titan as seen by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer after closest approach on a July 22, 2006, flyby.

The image was generated using the 5 micron wavelength for red, the 2 micron wavelength for green and the 1.2 micron wavelength for blue. The clouds, circled in the annotated version, are of the type seen previously and reported in the journal Science. The image shows the clouds spreading out along the 40-degree-south latitude line.

This image was taken at 160,000 kilometers (99,000 miles) from 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona where this image was produced.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm . The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team homepage is at http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona