Taking advantage of this low altitude, INMS will sample Titan's ionosphere. RADAR will capture a Synthetic Aperture Radar Imager (SAR) swath over the Tui Regio area of Xanadu. Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) observations suggest that, like Hotei Arcus, Tui Regio may be connected to cryovolcanism. The study of Titan is one of the major goals of the Cassini-Huygens mission as the planet may preserve, in deep-freeze, many of the chemical compounds that preceded life on Earth. Long hidden behind a thick veil of haze, Titan is the only moon in the solar system that possesses a dense atmosphere (10x denser than Earth's). The fact that this atmosphere is rich in organic material and that living organisms as we know them are composed of organic material is particularly intriguing. "Organic" means only that the material is carbon-based, and does not necessarily imply any connection to living organisms.
The photo, courtesy of NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2008, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.222 million kilometers (1.381 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 10 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.