World Beneath the Haze

Surface details on Titan are seen faintly through the murky haze of the moon's atmosphere.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North is toward the top of the image.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 30, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 370,000 kilometers (230,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 87 degrees. Image scale is 22 kilometers (14 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