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Titan's Halo

Nov. 12, 2009
In this image, NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks down on the north pole of Titan, and, although this view is centered on the leading hemisphere of the moon, the lit terrain seen here is mostly on the opposite, trailing hemisphere of the moon.

Saturn's moon Titan displays a detached, high-altitude global haze layer which is often its most prominent feature in ultraviolet views such as this one.

See PIA07774 to learn more.

In this image, Cassini looks down on the north pole of Titan, and, although this view is centered on the leading hemisphere of the moon, the lit terrain seen here is mostly on the opposite, trailing hemisphere of the moon.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 19, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 141 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.

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