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Hazy Ring

June 18, 2012
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward the dark side of Saturn's largest moon and captures the halo-like ring produced by sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan's atmosphere.

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the dark side of Saturn's largest moon and captures the halo-like ring produced by sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan's atmosphere.

A detached, high-altitude global haze layer encircles Titan. See PIA07774 to learn more. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across). North on Titan is up and rotated 29 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 30, 2012. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 123,000 miles (197,000 kilometers) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (12 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, 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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