Dark Lowlands

Through the obscuring haze come glimpses of Titan's dune seas.

The dark, equatorial region known as Shangri-la is visible here. Cassini radar images show that Shangri-la and other dark regions around the moon's middle are filled with vast stretches of parallel dunes (see PIA07785). These regions appear to be lowland areas surrounded by brighter, higher terrain.

Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North is up and rotated 21 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 19, 2007 using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of polarized infrared light centered at 746 and 938 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (851,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 80 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute