Detached Haze

The Cassini spacecraft peers closely at the layers of organic haze in Titan's upper atmosphere during a recent flyby.

Planet-sized Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 20, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 190,000 kilometers (118,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 133 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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