Infrared views of Huygens landing site

This image provides a comparison between the Huygens landing site on Titan as viewed by the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) and the NACO/SDI instrument mounted on the 8-metre Yepun telescope of the VLT (Very Large Telescope) station, in Chile.

From the two images it is possible to see a high consistency between the two measurements. The Cassini image - taken in the near-infrared (938 nanometres)- shows the Huygens landing site map wrapped around Titan, rotated to the same position as the January 2005 NACO/SDI observations.

The coloured lines outline the regions that were imaged by Cassini at different resolutions. The lower-resolution imaging sequences are outlined in blue. Other areas have been specifically targeted to build moderate and high resolution mosaics of surface features. These include the site where the Huygens probe has touched down on 14 January 2005, marked with the yellow X, and located at a latitude of 10.3° south and a longitude of 192.32° west (or 167.7° east).

The landing site is located on the boundary between the bright region called Adiri and the dark one called Shangri-la.

The red colour on the NACO/SDI image corresponds to an atmospheric filter at 1.625 micron, while the blue colour corresponds to a filter for the surface at 1.600 and 1.575 micron.