The Land Beneath the Murk

The "H"-shaped region Fensal-Aztlan is faintly visible on Saturn's murky moon Titan in this enhanced clear-filter view from Cassini.

While most of the light passing through the clear filters is visible light, a small portion of the light is in the treasured infrared windows that allow views down to the moon's frigid surface.

At the upper left, dark wavelike features in the atmosphere encircle the moon's north pole.

The view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North is up and rotated 35 degrees to the left.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 7, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees. The image scale is 14 kilometers (9 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