The Cassini spacecraft photographed a strange white streak on Titan
During the last flyby of Saturn's moon Titan, the spacecraft captured an infrared image of the bright Xandou region and the moon's south pole. Titan's diameter is 5,150 km.
Southeast of Xandu (and above the center of the picture) there is a strange formation that looks like a semicircle and has therefore earned the informal nickname "the smile". The formation is the brightest spot on Titan's surface, in both visible and infrared light. The width of the smile is 560 kilometers.
In the landing zone of the successful Huygens spacecraft, bright areas meant elevated places, while dark areas were low areas that contained a higher proportion of organic byproducts of Titan's atmospheric photochemistry. This result seems to confirm an old hypothesis according to which the Xando area is a high area or an area where the ice is less polluted. However, the reason for the brightest mysterious smile is still being investigated.
South of there, a field of bright clouds circles the pole, moving at a speed of several meters per second. Near the edge of the image, Cassini peers through Cassini's nitrogen-rich nebulous atmosphere. North in this picture means the upper left part.
The image was taken with the narrow-angle camera on June 4, 2005, at a distance of about 1.2 million km from Titan using spectral filters sensitive to the infrared wavelength, focused on 938 nm. The scale of the image is 7 kilometers per pixel.
