Titan in full colour
On approach to Saturn in June, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft snapped this image of the planet's largest moon, Titan. On 2 July, Cassini-Huygens again imaged the moon, one of the prime targets for the mission. Raw images and data from this Titan fly-by are expected soon.
Despite the views of Saturn's moon provided recently by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, the surface of Titan still remains indiscernible to the human eye. Images taken with the narrow-angle camera using red, green and blue colour filters were combined to create this view.
In true-colour images taken in visible wavelengths, Titan's photochemical smog, rich in organic material, gives the moon a smooth, featureless orange glow.
The Cassini orbiter carries specially designed spectral filters that can pierce this veil of smog. Furthermore, its piggybacked Huygens probe will descend through the atmosphere in early 2005, giving a close-up look at this mysterious moon.
The images making up this colour view were obtained from a distance of approximately 13.1 million kilometres on 10 June 2004. The image scale is approximately 79 kilometres per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency.
Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
