Xanadu’s Meandering Rivers

A network of river channels is located atop Xanadu, the continent-sized region on Saturn's moon Titan. This radar image was captured by the Cassini Radar Mapper on April 30, 2006.

These winding, meandering river channels start from the top of the image and run like a fork in the road, splitting to the right and left of the image. At Titan's chilly conditions, streams of methane and/or ethane might flow across parts of the region.

The picture is roughly 230 kilometers (143 miles) wide by 340 kilometers (211 miles) long, and shows features as small as 500 meters (1,640 feet).

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