PIA06549: Squashed Pole
 Target Name:  Titan
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle
 Product Size:  597 x 602 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  CICLOPS/Space Science Institute
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA06549.tif (97.81 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA06549.jpg (7.375 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:

Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan displays a surprisingly flattened-looking north pole in this Cassini image. The cause of this flattening is not presently known. Titan's diameter is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles).

A hint of the bright, streak-like clouds seen intermittently in Cassini images of the south polar region is faintly visible at the bottom of the image.

This view was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Nov. 1, 2004, at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 99 degrees. The image scale is 17 kilometers (10.6 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2004-12-29