Northern Bands

Titan's fast-rotating atmosphere creates circumpolar bands in the north.

The Cassini spacecraft acquired this view of the smoggy moon following a flyby of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) on March 26, 2007.

The image was taken in visible violet light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 275,000 kilometers (171,000 miles) from Titan. Image scale is 33 kilometers (20 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