Dark Belet

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the dark region of Belet on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

This large region on the moon has a low albedo, meaning it diffusely reflects little light. See Map of Titan - February 2009 to learn more. This view looks toward the area between the trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North on Titan is up and rotated 8 degrees to the left.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 28, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 282,000 kilometers (175,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 17 kilometers (10 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