Mountains North of Aaru on Titan

A mosaic of mountainous terrain on Titan
August 12, 2010
PIA NumberPIA13330
Language
  • english

This mosaic, made from radar images obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows mountainous terrain on Saturn's moon Titan in the moon's northern hemisphere, north of the Aaru region. The annotated version shows topographic profiles measured by the radar instrument, with red-orange areas showing the highest elevation (in this image, 600 meters, or 2,000 feet, above the mean radius of Titan) and purple showing the lowest (in this image, 800 meters, or 2,600 feet, below the mean radius of Titan). That version also shows a grid for latitude and longitude. This region presents a mountain block near 52 degrees north latitude and 13 degrees east longitude.

The tallest features in this image are about 1,400 meters higher than the valley next to it.

Cassini's radar instrument obtained the black and white images making up the mosaic on July 22, Sept. 22, and Oct. 9, 2006. In radar images, objects appear bright when they are tilted toward the spacecraft or have rough surfaces. The topographical data were derived from the same flybys.

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. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech