Giant pits cover the impact-eroded face of Hyperion, giving it a spongy
appearance. The chaotically tumbling moon is extremely porous, like the
moons orbiting in and near Saturn's rings.
Hyperion is 280 kilometers (174 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 12, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.1
million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Hyperion and at a
Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46 degrees. Scale in the
original image was 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel. The image was
contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of two.
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.