The Cassini spacecraft passed within a cosmic stone's throw of Telesto in
October, 2005 capturing this shot of the tiny Trojan moon.
Telesto (24 kilometers, or 15 miles across) appears to be mantled in fine,
icy material, although a few craters and some outcrops and/or large
boulders are visible. Its smooth surface does not appear to retain the
record of intense cratering that most of Saturn's other moons possess.
The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2005, at a distance of approximately
14,500 kilometers (9,000 miles) from Telesto. The image scale is 86 meters
(283 feet) per pixel.
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 operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage
is at http://ciclops.org.