Belet Below the Haze

The Cassini spacecraft peers down through the hazy atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan to view the dark region called Belet.

This image was captured using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The large region called Belet has a low albedo, meaning it reflects little light. See Map of Titan - February 2009 and Titanic Deluge to learn more.

This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Titan. North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 23, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (990,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 14 degrees. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute