The blob of light seen here is Saturn's moon Telesto, which shares its
orbital path with the much larger moon Tethys. Telesto is 24 kilometers
(15 miles) across.
Although this view may hint at a flattened, potato-like shape for Telesto
(a common shape for Saturn's smaller moons), no features on the moon's
surface can be resolved here.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately
768,000 kilometers (477,000 miles) from Telesto and at a
Sun-Telesto-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel. The image has been
contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of four 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 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
