Titan's Night Side
Date: 16 February 2005
Satellite: Cassini
Depicts: Titan's atmosphere
Copyright: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
This image of Titan's night side was taken during Cassini’s very close flyby of the smoggy moon on 15 February 2005.
The image shows Titan's thick atmosphere illuminated from behind by sunlight. A detached haze layer is visible over the entire globe. The haze layer over the north-polar region (at the top) has an unusual structure, a feature that imaging scientists have noticed in earlier flybys but do not yet fully understand.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of visible blue light centred at 460 nanometres. The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 134 000 kilometres from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 158 degrees. Resolution in the image is about 8 kilometres per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
