PIA08971: In Shangri-la
 Target Name:  Titan
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle
 Product Size:  936 x 500 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA08971.tif (468.7 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA08971.jpg (42.11 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

This view of Titan's surface highlights northwestern Shangri-la -- a large, equatorial dark region revealed by radar observations to be covered in longitudinal dune fields. The bright, circular feature right of center is a potential impact crater -- few of which have been spotted on Titan thus far.

North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up and rotated about 15 degrees to the right.

This view was created by combining multiple images taken using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 and 619 nanometers.

The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 13, 2007 at a distance of approximately 125,000 kilometers (77,000 miles) from Titan. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) per pixel. Due to scattering of light by Titan's hazy atmosphere, the sizes of surface features that can be resolved are a few times larger than the actual pixel scale.

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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2007-06-27