Almost the entire disk of Titan is illuminated by the sun in this low-phase image of Saturn's largest moon. With the sun behind the Cassini spacecraft, the camera can clearly see the dark Senkyo region and the bright area south of the equator called Tsegihi.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan. North on Titan (5150 kilometers, or 3200 miles across) is up and rotated 34 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 30, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 14 kilometers (9 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.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.