Titan’s Two Halves

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Caption:

Two different seasons on Titan in different hemispheres can be seen in this image. The moon's northern half appears slightly darker than the southern half in this view taken in visible blue light by the Cassini spacecraft.

See PIA11603 to learn more about seasonal change on Titan.

Also visible in this image are hints of atmospheric banding around Titan's north pole. To learn more about the northern bands, see PIA08928 .

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 45 degrees to the left.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 22, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 38 degrees. Image scale is 12 kilometers (7 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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