The Cassini spacecraft's close flyby of Epimetheus in December 2007
returned detailed images of the moon's south polar region.
The view shows what might be the remains of a large impact crater covering
most of this face, and which could be responsible for the somewhat
flattened shape of the southern part of Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72
miles across) seen previously at much lower resolution.
The image also shows two terrain types: darker, smoother areas, and
brighter, slightly more yellowish, fractured terrain. One interpretation
of this image is that the darker material evidently moves down slopes, and
probably has a lower ice content than the brighter material, which appears
more like "bedrock." Nonetheless, materials in both terrains are likely to
be rich in water ice.
The images that were used to create this enhanced color view were taken
with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 3, 2007. The views
were obtained at a distance of approximately 37,400 kilometers (23,000
miles) from Epimetheus and at a Sun-Epimetheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 65 degrees. Image scale is 224 meters (735 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.
