This Side of Paradise

Named for other-worldly paradises, the dark regions of Senkyo and Aaru comprise the center of this image of Saturn's moon Titan. The Egyptian fields of Aaru were paradise for the god Osiris. This side of Titan, which always faces Saturn, is on the opposite side of the moon from Shangri-La and Adiri, the home to the Huygens probe.

The craft touched down on the border between the lowland dunes of Shangri-La and the higher terrains of Adiri. Like Senkyo and Aaru, these regions' namesakes reflect heavenly aspirations.

North is up in this image.

Senkyo is the equatorial region to the right of the center of the image. Aaru is above Senkyo.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 12, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers.The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.361 million kilometers (1.467 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 35 degrees. 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