PIA12615: Behold Belet


Behold Belet

Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft looks at Belet, a dark region on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

This large region on the moon has a low albedo, meaning it diffusely reflects little light. See PIA11149 to learn more. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). North on Titan is up and rotated 2 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 15, 2010 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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 Saturn Titan
System Saturn
Target Type Planet Satellite
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
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2010-04-20
Date in Caption 2010-01-15
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12615
Identifier PIA12615