PIA08958: Bright to Dark


Bright to Dark

Caption:

This Cassini spacecraft view shows the interesting north-south asymmetry in Titan's atmosphere, which is thought to be a seasonal effect.

North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is up and rotated 30 degrees to the right.

The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 889 nanometers. The view was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 4, 2007 at a distance of approximately 3 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 54 degrees. Image scale is 18 kilometers (11 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/home/index.cfm . 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, Infrared, Rotation, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2007-06-08
Date in Caption 2007-05-04
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08958
Identifier PIA08958