A World of Questions

Titan
February 8, 2008
PIA NumberPIA09833
Language
  • english

Titan's hazy orange globe hangs before the Cassini spacecraft, partly illuminated -- a world with many mysteries yet to be uncovered.

North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up and rotated 30 degrees to the right. The moon's north pole tilts slightly away from the spacecraft here.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 5, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 213,000 kilometers (133,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 128 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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