Titanic Complexity

This view of Titan reveals structure in the moon's complex atmosphere. The geometry of the Cassini spacecraft's view of Titan during this flyby was similar to that of Voyager 1's pass in 1980.

The image was taken in visible violet light and shows the detached high haze layer that envelops Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across), with additional complexity to its structure in the far north. Some of this atmospheric structure is also visible in a color view (see PIA07700) taken at about the same time..

The image was taken in visible violet light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 26, 2005, at a distance of approximately 194,000 kilometers (121,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. The image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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