The Cassini spacecraft looks at Saturn's largest moon, Titan, revealing
its halo-like ring formed in the upper hazes of the moon's extensive
atmosphere.
To learn more, see PIA08868. For a color view, see PIA07774.
This view looks toward the darkened leading hemisphere of Titan (5150
kilometers, or 3200 miles across), but lit terrain seen here is on on the
trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of the moon. The moon's north
pole lies on the terminator between the illuminated and unilluminated
parts of the moon. The pole is rotated 11 degrees to the right in this
image.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
July 5, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from
Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 148 degrees. Image
scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.