This unusual view of Saturn's moon Hyperion (266 kilometers, 165 miles
across) shows just how strangely shaped this tumbling little moon is.
Hyperion is the largest of Saturn's irregularly-shaped moons.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Dec. 10, 2004, at a distance of 3.5 million kilometers
(2.2 million miles) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 68 degrees. The image scale is about 21 kilometers (13
miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and
contrast enhanced to aid visibility.
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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were
designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.