Titan Through the Haze

The Cassini spacecraft peers through the hazy atmosphere of Titan for a close view of light and dark terrain on Saturn's largest moon.

This view is centered on terrain at 28 degrees south latitude, 334 degrees west longitude and shows a small part of the albedo feature named Senkyo on the trailing hemisphere of Titan (5150 kilometers, or 3200 miles across).

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 9, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 251,000 kilometers (156,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27 degrees. Image scale is about 1 kilometer (3,281feet) 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