Ring Around Titan

The Cassini spacecraft looks at Saturn's largest moon, Titan, revealing its halo-like ring formed in the upper hazes of the moon's extensive atmosphere.

To learn more, see Bands of Titan. For a color view, see Titan's Halo.

This view looks toward the darkened leading hemisphere of Titan (5150 kilometers, or 3200 miles across), but lit terrain seen here is on on the trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of the moon. The moon's north pole lies on the terminator between the illuminated and unilluminated parts of the moon. The pole is rotated 11 degrees to the right in this image.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 5, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 148 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