Dark Quartet

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Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft gazes at several albedo features on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Left to right are four dark regions: Fensal, Aztlan, Aaru and a part of Senkyo. The bright area Quivira lies near the center of the image, separating Fensal and Aztlan. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 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 June 25, 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 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 12 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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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