Senkyo Through the Clouds

The Cassini spacecraft once again dons its special infrared glasses to peer through Titan's haze and monitor its surface. Here, Cassini has recaptured the equatorial region dubbed ''Senkyo.'' The dark features are believed to be vast dunes of hydrocarbon particles that precipitated out of Titan's atmosphere.

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) across. For more on Senkyo, see Saturn's View of Titan .

This view looks toward Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 4 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 16, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers.

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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute