Titan's Surface Revealed

Piercing the ubiquitous layer of smog enshrouding Titan, these images from the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer reveals an exotic surface covered with a variety of materials in the southern hemisphere.

Visible is a circular feature that may be a crater in the north.

Using near-infrared colors--some three times deeper in the red visible
to the human eye--these images reveal the surface with unusual clarity.

The color image shows a false-color combination of three previous
images. The yellow areas correspond to the hydrocarbon-rich regions,
while the green areas are the icier regions.

Here, the methane cloud
appears white, as it is bright in all three colors.

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 Cassini orbiter was designed,
developed and assembled at JPL. The visible and infrared mapping
spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

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