Media Information

 
 
 
Collection:
NASA Cassini-Huygens Collection
Title:
Bands of Titan
Description:
Titan bears a distinct east-west banded pattern in this Cassini spacecraft image taken in the ultraviolet.
Full Description:
Titan bears a distinct east-west banded pattern in this Cassini spacecraft image taken in the ultraviolet.

The ultraviolet wavelength allows Cassini to see Titan's stratosphere, where superrotation -- in which the atmosphere moves around the moon faster than Titan rotates -- is strong. The recent appearance of this feature may be a harbinger of seasonal change on Titan.

The moon's halo -- its detached, high-altitude global haze layer -- is visible here as well, and is often its most prominent feature in such ultraviolet views. North on Titan (5,150 kilometers, 3,200 miles across) is up and rotated 6 degrees to the right in this image.

The view was obtained by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of polarized ultraviolet light. The view was acquired on Dec. 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft , or phase, angle of 123 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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 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.n…. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Date:
February 2, 2007
Keywords:
Titan
Keywords:
stratosphere
Keywords:
superrotation
Keywords:
halo
facet_what:
Saturn
facet_what:
Cassini
facet_what:
Cassini-Huygens
facet_what:
Huygens Probe
facet_what:
Moon
facet_what:
Titan
facet_what:
Cassini Orbiter
facet_what:
Sun
facet_where:
Saturn
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
facet_where:
California
facet_where:
Washington
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
facet_where:
Washington, D.C.
facet_when:
February 2, 2007
facet_when_year:
2007
UID:
SPD-SATRN-2471
original url:

Bands of Titan