CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Titan's Polar Atmosphere

Titan's atmosphere puts on a display with the detached haze to the north (top of image) and the polar vortex to the south.

Titan (3200 miles, 5150 kilometers across) is Saturn's largest moon. For a color image of the south polar vortex on Titan, see PIA14919. For a movie of the vortex, see PIA14920.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 24 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 20, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 889 nanometers.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 9 miles (15 kilometers) 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-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Released: January 13, 2014 (PIA 17151)
Image/Caption Information 		  Titan's Polar Atmosphere
PIA 17151
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Alliance Member Comments
NeKto (Jan 18, 2014 at 4:38 PM):
it is such a small object with such low gravity yet it holds one of the deepest atmospheres of any solid body in our solar system.
fascinating!