Titan Makes Contact

The murky orange disk of Saturn's moon Titan glides past -- a silent, floating sphere transiting Saturn.

Titan's photochemical smog completely obscures the surface in such natural color views. Its high-altitude hazes are visible against the disk of Saturn as they attenuate the light reflected by the planet.

Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3200 miles) across. The view was acquired from less than a degree above Saturn's ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2007, at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Titan. Image scale is 15 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