Titan’s Fancy Collar

Titan's polar collar -- previously seen by Voyager 2 and the Hubble Space Telescope -- has now been observed by the Cassini spacecraft, seen here in ultraviolet light. The collar is believed to be seasonal in nature. Researchers are still studying its cause and evolution.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 32 degrees to the right. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 13, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 4 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) 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