Almost the entire disk of Titan is illuminated by the sun in this
low-phase image of Saturn's largest moon. With the sun behind the Cassini
spacecraft, the camera can clearly see the dark Senkyo region and the
bright area south of the equator called Tsegihi.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan. North on Titan
(5150 kilometers, or 3200 miles across) is up and rotated 34 degrees to
the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle
camera on Jan. 30, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths
of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was acquired
at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles)
from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 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.