The hazy atmosphere of Titan. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Click to enlarge
This beautiful photograph shows how the hazy atmosphere on Saturn’s moon Titan is broken up into many layers. Titan’s north pole is at the upper left in this picture. Cassini took this image on March 16, 2006 when it was approximately 1.2 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Titan.
The complex and dynamic atmosphere of Titan displays multiple haze layers near the north pole in this view, which also provides an excellent look at the detached stratospheric haze layer that surrounds the moon at lower latitudes.
North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up and rotated 20 degrees to the left.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 16, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The image was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 68 degrees. Image scale is 7 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 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