Titan’s Varied Atmosphere

Titan shows us its active polar atmosphere with the north polar hood and south polar vortex both on display in this image captured by the Cassini spacecraft.

The north polar hood is visible as the dark cap on the moon’s cloud layer at the top of Titan in this image and the south polar vortex is visible as the bright feature at the bottom. For more on Titan’s south polar vortex, see Titan’s South Polar Vortex in Motion.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across). North on Titan is up.

The image was taken in violet light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 25, 2012. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 175,000 miles (281,000 kilometers) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. Image scale is 10 miles (17 kilometers) 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. Full-Res: PIA14630