PIA18309: Frozen Paradise


Frozen Paradise

Caption:

Named after a Japanese paradise, the Senkyo region of Titan (the dark area below and to the right of center) is a bit less welcoming than its namesake.

With a very inhospitable average temperature of approximately 290 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-180 degrees Celsius), water on Titan (3,200 miles or 5,150 kilometers across) freezes hard enough to be essentially considered rock.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 33 degrees to the right. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 8, 2015 using a near-infrared filter which is centered at 938 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel.

Background Info:

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. 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 and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Titan Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Planet
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Infrared, Rotation, Visual, Water
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2015-03-02
Date in Caption 2015-01-08
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA18309
Identifier PIA18309