Jumbled Terrain

High-resolution images taken during Cassini's close encounter with Titan on April 16, 2005, provide still more examples of the complicated relationships between the dark and bright materials on Titan's surface.

During the two most recent flybys of Titan, on March 31 and April 16, Cassini captured a number of images of the hemisphere of Titan that faces Saturn. The image at the left is taken from a mosaic of images obtained in March (see PIA06222) and shows the location of the view at the right.

The image at the right, taken during the most recent Titan flyby, shows a complex pattern of small, 40-kilometer-wide (25-mile), dark features within a brighter area. Similar to PIA06223, several narrow, dark and curvilinear features can be seen that may hint of dark channels within the bright material. Cassini's synthetic aperture radar experiment also observed this region in February, and the visual infrared mapping spectrometer experiment observed along with the imaging science subsystem cameras in April. Comparisons of these data sets will be important in understanding the geologic history of this complex region.

The view at the left consists of five images that have been added together and enhanced to bring out surface detail and to reduce noise, although some camera artifacts remain.

These images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers -- considered to be the imaging science subsystem's best spectral filter for observing the surface of Titan. This view was acquired from a distance of 36,000 kilometers (22,400 miles). The pixel scale of this image is 430 meters (0.3 miles) per pixel, although the actual resolution is likely to be several times larger.

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.