Titan Behind Saturn and the Rings

This photograph shows Titan partly obscured behind Saturn and its rings. The image was taken from above the ringplane, and shows the side of the planet unlit by the Sun. Cassini captured this view on May 10, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn.

Cassini’s “eyes” — its powerful imaging cameras — bear witness to the majestic and spectacular sights of the Saturn system, as this views attests. Here, the probe gazes upon Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) in the distance beyond Saturn and its dark and graceful rings.

This view was taken from above the ringplane and looks toward the unlit side of the rings.

The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The image was obtained using the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 10, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn and 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Titan. The image was taken at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 149 degrees. Image scale is 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Saturn.

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 mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release