PIA12524: Halving Titan


Halving Titan

Caption:

Titan's seasonal hemispheric dichotomy is chronicled in black and white, with the moon's northern half appearing slightly lighter than the dark southern half.

See PIA11603 to learn more about this change on Titan. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side 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 Oct. 16, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 889 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 71 degrees. Image scale is 16 kilometers (10 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 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, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2010-01-11
Date in Caption 2009-10-16
Image Credit Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12524
Identifier PIA12524