Titan’s Dark Senkyo

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the dark Senkyo region on Saturn's moon Titan.

Senkyo is the dark region towards the right. Two other dark regions, Aztlan (to the left, slanting down below the equator) and Fensal (left, north of Aztlan), are also shown here. The bright area below Aztlan is called Tsegihi. See Details of Dark Senkyo for a closer view of Senkyo and to learn more. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North on Titan is up and rotated 9 degrees to the left.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2010 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees. Image scale is 12 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