CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Slicing Before Titan

Slicing Before Titan
PIA 12772
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   Saturn's rings interrupt this view of the planet's largest moon, Titan.

Dark albedo features on Titan (5150 kilometers, 3200 miles across) and the moon's north polar hood are visible here. See PIA08137 and PIA09739 to learn more.

This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from just below the ringplane and toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan. North on Titan is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 12, 2011 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 11 degrees. Image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. 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 Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: June 27, 2011 (PIA 12772)
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