CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Dawn at the Huygens Site

Dawn at the Huygens Site
PIA 07565
Avg Rating: 10/10

Full Size 1008x1008:
JPEG 53 KB
PNG 139 KB
TIFF 1.0 MB
   Titan's equatorial latitudes are distinctly different in character from its south polar region, as this image shows.

The dark, presumably lowland, terrain seen here does not extend much farther south than about 30 degrees South. The successful Huygens probe landed in such a region. The Huygens probe is rotating into the light here, seeing the dawn of a new day.

The bright region toward the right side of Titan's disk is Xanadu. This area is thought to consist of upland terrain that is relatively uncontaminated by the dark material that fills the lowland regions.

Near the moon's south pole, and just eastward of the terminator, is the dark feature identified by imaging scientists as the best candidate (thus far) for a past or present hydrocarbon lake on Titan (see PIA06241). Farther east of the lake-like feature, bright clouds arc around the pole. These clouds occupy a latitude range that is consistent with previously-seen convective cloud activity on Titan.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, at 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera on July 7, 2005, from a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees degrees. The image was obtained using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The image scale is 7 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in 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.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: August 16, 2005 (PIA 07565)
Image/Caption Information