Named for other-worldly paradises, the dark regions of Senkyo and Aaru
comprise the center of this image of Saturn's moon Titan. The Egyptian
fields of Aaru were paradise for the god Osiris. This side of Titan, which
always faces Saturn, is on the opposite side of the moon from Shangri-La
and Adiri, the home to the Huygens probe.
The craft touched down on the border between the lowland dunes of
Shangri-La and the higher terrains of Adiri. Like Senkyo and Aaru, these
regions' namesakes reflect heavenly aspirations.
North is up in this image.
Senkyo is the equatorial region to the right of the center of the image.
Aaru is above Senkyo.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Dec. 12, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 938 nanometers.The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 2.361 million kilometers (1.467 million miles) from Titan
and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 35 degrees. Image scale
is 14 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.