Titan's globally distributed detached haze layer and the moon's north
polar hood, both notable details of its thick atmosphere, are clearly seen
in this image from the Cassini spacecraft.
Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across, slightly larger than
Mercury.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using
a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of polarized
ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 1.742 million kilometers (1.083 million miles)
from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees.
Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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.