Titan
1. Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft. When we gaze at the moon with the eye, we see only the upper layers of its dense atmosphere. But many mysteries lie beneath.
2. True-color image of layers of haze in Titan’s atmosphere
(Source: Wikipedia)
A Startling Vortex on the South Pole of Titan
The Cassini imaging team released today a near-true-color image and a movie taken during a flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan on June 27, 2012 by the Cassini spacecraft. The image reveals a swirling, whirling vortex forming high in the atmosphere overlying the south pole of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, as the moon’s southern hemisphere slowly becomes engulfed in the darkness of deep autumn. The south pole of Titan (3,200 miles across) is near the center of the view. Scientists have long known that the entire winter hemisphere of Titan can exhibit a polar “hood” of haze made of condensing organic compounds, but this is something new and amazing.
Titan and Dione as seen by Cassini
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
A body of mystery
Titan (or Saturn VI) is the largest moon of Saturn. It is the only natural satellite known to have a dense atmosphere, and the only object other than Earth for which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found.
1. Cassini image of Titan, behind Epimetheus and the rings; 2. Cassini image of Titan in front of the rings of Saturn
Saturn, Titan, and Prometheus
Cassini captured this view of Saturn with Titan and Prometheus with its wide-angle camera on January 5, 2011 at about 08:00 UTC. Titan is on the far side of Saturn from Cassini, more than 1,800,000 kilometers away; Prometheus is much closer, only about 500,000 kilometers away. The different distances exaggerate Prometheus’ size with respect to Titan. In fact, Titan is roughly 30 times Prometheus’ diameter.
NASA / JPL / SSI / color composite by Gordan Ugarkovic
Million-Ring Circus
1. RINGS FROM AFAR
Measuring 175,000 miles wide but as little as 30 feet thick, Saturn’s rings contain debris of varying ages and composition, all revolving at different speeds.
2. THREE MOONS
Titan and Dione, along with speck-sized Prometheus appear in rare alignment. Tiny so-called shepherd moons help shape the rings and prevent them from dispersing.
3. TITAN
Concentric rings wind in front of Satrun’s biggest moon, Titan, with tiny Janus in teh foreground. The rings are so massive that they have their own atmosphere, separate from Saturn’s. Cassini found evidence of oxygen all around the icy rings.
4. RINGS CLOSE UP
(Source: discovermagazine.com)
Two of a kind
Enigmatic Titan
Titan’s golden, smog-like atmosphere and complex layered hazes appear to Cassini as a luminous ring around the planet-sized moon. The world beneath that haze has become slightly less mysterious under the gaze of Cassini and its Huygens probe, but many new discoveries await.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Enceladus: A Tectonic Feast
The Cassini spacecraft has been studying Saturn and its moons since it entered orbit in 2004. This image, taken on Oct. 5, 2008, is a stunning mosaic of the geologically active Enceladus after a Cassini flyby.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Titan
Composite of three raw CB3 filtered images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on December 15, 2011 from a distance of 1 million km. To make the image, the three raws were resized 5x blended by averaging, and obvious defects (3 spots in a row) clone stamped out. Contrast adjustment and resizing was also done.
The dark dune sand sea of Belet is visible in this image. To the right, the bright terrain known as Adiri appears as a bright splotch surrounded by the narrow dune sea of Ching-Tu to the S and Shangri-La to the N and E. At the extreme eastern end of Adiri, near the terminator at left, is the Huygens landing site. North is approximately at top in this image.
Image credits: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute / Mike Malaska
A Portrait of Saturn’s Hazy Moon Titan
On Jan. 30, the Cassini spacecraft executed a flyby maneuver of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, passing within 19,340 miles (31,130 km) of its surface.
This color composite image of the cloud-covered moon was created by combining raw data acquired with Cassini’s Imaging Science System (ISS) in red, green, blue and clear color channels. The result is a color image approximating what the human eye might see, albeit somewhat brighter due to the low levels of light at Saturn’s distance from the sun.
![Saturn’s two largest moons, captured in tandem
Saturn has 62 known moons. Pictured here are the biggest of the lot, arranged as two crescents, one sitting atop the other.
The one you’ve probably heard of before is Titan [click here for hi-res]. Within our solar system, the massive orb is second only to Jupiter’s Ganymede in size. It’s also the only moon with a dense, fully developed atmosphere, the haze of which is clearly visible here, even from a photographed distance of 1.2-million miles.
Much less substantial is the “atmosphere” of Rhea, shown here looming 400,000 miles closer than its sibling. But Rhea will surprise you. In 2010, measurements made by NASA’s Cassini orbiter (the same spacecraft that took this photograph), revealed what researchers described as a tenuous, oxygen/carbon dioxide atmosphere. Rhea is made up mostly of water ice; when this ice is irradiated by charged particles from Saturn, it decomposes into hydrogen and oxygen. But don’t plan on popping the hatch on your spacecraft next time you find yourself marooned there — Rhea’s atmosphere may be 70% O2, but it’s still trillions of times less abundant than what you’ll find here on Earth.
Like the researchers said: when it comes to wimpy atmospheres like Rhea’s, the key word is tenuous.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0061nCO1H1qbkzabo1_500.jpg)
Saturn’s two largest moons, captured in tandem
Saturn has 62 known moons. Pictured here are the biggest of the lot, arranged as two crescents, one sitting atop the other.
The one you’ve probably heard of before is Titan [click here for hi-res]. Within our solar system, the massive orb is second only to Jupiter’s Ganymede in size. It’s also the only moon with a dense, fully developed atmosphere, the haze of which is clearly visible here, even from a photographed distance of 1.2-million miles.
Much less substantial is the “atmosphere” of Rhea, shown here looming 400,000 miles closer than its sibling. But Rhea will surprise you. In 2010, measurements made by NASA’s Cassini orbiter (the same spacecraft that took this photograph), revealed what researchers described as a tenuous, oxygen/carbon dioxide atmosphere. Rhea is made up mostly of water ice; when this ice is irradiated by charged particles from Saturn, it decomposes into hydrogen and oxygen. But don’t plan on popping the hatch on your spacecraft next time you find yourself marooned there — Rhea’s atmosphere may be 70% O2, but it’s still trillions of times less abundant than what you’ll find here on Earth.
Like the researchers said: when it comes to wimpy atmospheres like Rhea’s, the key word is tenuous.
In, Around, Beyond Rings
A quartet of Saturn’s moons, from tiny to huge, surround and are embedded within the planet’s rings in this Cassini composition.
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is in the background of the image, and the moon’s north polar hood is clearly visible. See PIA08137 to learn more about that feature on Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across). Next, the wispy terrain on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers across) can be seen on that moon which appears just above the rings at the center of the image. See PIA10560 and PIA06163 to learn more about Dione’s wisps. Saturn’s small moon Pandora (50 miles, or 81 kilometers across) orbits beyond the rings on the right of the image. Finally, Pan (17 miles, or 28 kilometers across) can be seen in the Encke Gap of the A ring on the left of the image.
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 17, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27 degrees. Image scale is 8 miles (13 kilometers) per pixel on Dione.
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.
Titan Halo
Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
A halo surrounds Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Titan’s atmosphere, almost entirely nitrogen, extends some 370 miles (600 kilometers) into space—ten times as far as Earth’s atmosphere.
