Belet Close-Up

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Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft peers through the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, to examine the dark region Belet.

This large region on the moon's surface has a low albedo, meaning it reflects little light. See PIA11149 to learn more. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across).

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 28, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 282,000 kilometers (175,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel.

Background Info:

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 .

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