Titan’s North Polar Hood

This ultraviolet view of Titan shows the moon's north polar hood and its detached, high-altitude haze layer.

See Haze Layers on Titan 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 2 degrees to the left.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 13, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 61 degrees. Image scale is 26 kilometers (16 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