CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
On Titan's Night Side

This image of Titan's night side was taken during Cassini's very close flyby of the smoggy moon on February 15, 2005. The image shows Titan's thick atmosphere illuminated from behind by sunlight. A detached haze layer is visible over the entire globe. The haze layer over the north polar region (at top) has an unusal structure, a feature that imaging scientists have noticed in earlier flybys but do not yet fully understand.

The image was taken with the wide angle camera through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of visible blue light centered at 460 nanometers. The image was acquired from a distance of approximately 134,000 kilometers (83,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 158 degrees. Resolution in the image is about 8 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: February 17, 2005 (PIA 06184)
Image/Caption Information 		  On Titan's Night Side
PIA 06184
Avg Rating: 8.38/10

Full Size 978x950:
JPEG 185 KB
PNG 513 KB
TIFF 930 KB