Ghostly details make this dark scene more than just a beautiful grouping
of two Saturn moons, with Tethys on the left and Titan on the right. In
Titan's thick and inflated atmosphere, the detached high haze layer can
be seen, as well as the complex northern polar hood (at the top). Images
like this one can help scientists make definitive estimates of the
altitudes to which the high haze extends.
The faint vertical banded pattern is a type of noise that usually is
removed during image processing. Because this image was processed to
enhance the visibility of details in Titan's atmosphere and the faint G
ring, the vertical noise was also enhanced.
Titan is Saturn's largest moon, at 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.
Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.
This view was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.4
million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Titan and 1 million kilometers
(600,000 miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles)
per pixel on Titan and 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Tethys.
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
