The Cassini spacecraft beamed back this new, more detailed image of smog-enshrouded Titan on June 14.

This view represents an improvement in resolution of nearly a factor of three over the previous Cassini image release about Titan. The observed brightness variations are real on scales of a hundred kilometers or less.

The image was obtained in the near-infrared through a polarizing filter. The combination was designed to reduce the obscuration by atmospheric haze. The superimposed coordinate system grid in the accompanying image at right illustrates the geographical regions of the moon that are illuminated and visible, as well as the orientation of Titan -- north is up and rotated 25 degrees to the left. The yellow curve marks the position of the boundary between day and night on Titan.

This image shows about one quarter of Titan's surface, from 0 to 70 degrees West longitude, and just barely overlaps part of the surface shown in the previous Titan image release. Most of the visible surface in this image has not yet been shown in any Cassini image release.

The image was obtained with the narrow angle camera at a phase, or Sun-Titan-spacecraft, angle of 61 degrees and at a distance of  6.5 million miles (10.4 million kilometers) from Titan. The image scale is 39 miles (62 kilometers) per pixel. The image was magnified by a factor of two using a linear interpolation scheme. No further processing to remove the effects of the overlying atmosphere has been performed.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute