CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Titan's Cocoon

Titan's Cocoon
PIA 08964
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   Sunlight scatters through Titan's atmosphere, illuminating high hazes and bathing the entire moon in a soft glow.

This high phase angle view of Titan was acquired from 21 degrees below the smoggy moon's equator. The thin, detached haze layer that extends all the way around Titan is faintly visible.

North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, 3,200 miles across) is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 12, 2007 at a distance of approximately 305,000 kilometers (190,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 146 degrees. Image scale is 18 kilometers (11 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: June 18, 2007 (Happy 65th Birthday, Paul McCartney!) (PIA 08964)
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