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Titan's Polar Atmosphere

Jan. 13, 2014
Titan's atmosphere puts on a display with the detached haze to the north (top of image) and the polar vortex to the south as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Titan's atmosphere puts on a display with the detached haze to the north (top of image) and the polar vortex to the south.

Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across) is Saturn's largest moon. For a color image of the south polar vortex on Titan, see PIA14919. For a movie of the vortex, see PIA14920.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 24 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 20, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 889 nanometers.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 9 miles (15 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 and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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