PIA12764: Ethereal Ring


Ethereal Ring

Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the dark side of Saturn's largest moon and captures the halo-like ring produced by sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan's atmosphere.

A detached, high-altitude global haze layer encircles Titan. See PIA07774 to learn more. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North on Titan is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 26, 2010 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 154 degrees. Image scale is 12 kilometers (7 miles) 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 .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Titan
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Atmosphere, Grayscale, Haze, Ultraviolet, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2011-05-02
Date in Caption 2010-11-26
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12764
Identifier PIA12764