PIA14613: Hazy Ring


Hazy Ring

Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the dark side of Saturn's largest moon and captures the halo-like ring produced by sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan's atmosphere.

A detached, high-altitude global haze layer encircles Titan. See PIA07774 to learn more. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across). North on Titan is up and rotated 29 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 30, 2012. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 123,000 miles (197,000 kilometers) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (12 kilometers) 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 Wide Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Atmosphere, Grayscale, Haze, Rotation, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2012-06-18
Date in Caption 2012-01-30
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA14613
Identifier PIA14613