The Banded North

Looking toward high northern latitudes on Titan, the Cassini spacecraft spies a banded pattern encircling the pole. This sort of feature is what scientists expect to see in the stratosphere of Titan, where the atmosphere is superrotating, or moving around the moon faster than the moon itself rotates.

Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were taken by the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 28, 2007 at a distance of approximately 196,000 kilometers (122,000 miles) from Titan. 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