Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

Looking on the Brightside of Titan

Caption: As Cassini approached Titan on August 21, 2005, it captured this natural color view of the moon’s orange, global smog. The hazy atmosphere was frustrating to NASA Voyager scientists during the first tantalizing Titan flybys 25 years ago, but now Titan's surface is being revealed by Cassini with startling clarity (see PIA06222).

Images taken with the wide angle camera using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this color view. The images were acquired from a distance of approximately 213,000 kilometers (132,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 55 degrees. Resolution in the image is about 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Usage Restrictions: Image is in the public domain. Appropriate credit is requested.