A Titanic Mansion

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Caption:

Fensal, a magnificent mansion in Norse mythology, is home to Bazaruto Facula and Sinlap on Saturn's largest moon.

Two dark bands stretch across the moon Titan in this image: Fensal north of the equator and Aztlan south of the equator.

The eastern part of Fensal features the white circle of Bazaruto Facula. This bright 215-kilometer (134-mile) wide feature is visible just below the center of the image. Inside it is Sinlap, a dark 80-kilometer (50-mile) wide crater.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan (5150 kilometers, or 3200 miles across). North on Titan is up and rotated 24 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 2, 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 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Titan, and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 54 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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 .

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