Saturn’s View of Titan

The Cassini spacecraft looks through Titan's thick atmosphere to reveal bright and dark terrains on the Saturn-facing side of the planet's largest moon. North is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.222 million kilometers (1.381 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 10 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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