Murky World

Straining to make out the surface of Titan through its murky atmosphere, the Cassini spacecraft's wide angle camera manages to exploit one of the infrared spectral windows where the particulate smog is transparent enough for a peek.

The Senkyo region is visible in the north, while Mezzoramia lies to the south in this view of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). (See Map of Titan - December 2006.)

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The image was taken on Jan. 29, 2007 at a distance of approximately 79,000 kilometers (49,000 miles) from Titan. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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