Titan's Northern Lake

In the top right of this Cassini image, the southern end of Titan's huge lake of liquid hydrocarbons called Kraken Mare is visible near the moon's north pole.

See PIA11146 to learn more about Titan's lake districts and to see a map. Near the moon's equator are the albedo features Senkyo on the right and Aztlan on the left. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North on Titan is up and rotated 31 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 12, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 252,000 kilometers (157,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 11 degrees. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 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.