Cassini soars above the many pits and basins in the rolling landscape of
Saturn's moon Iapetus. This mosaic view looks out onto an area close to
the northern bright/dark boundary, but still within the dark region,
Cassini Regio.
Near upper left is a large crater with terraced walls, a mostly flat floor
and a prominent group of peaks in its center. The sharp features make this
likely one of the youngest craters in this area of Iapetus. Cassini imaged
another similarly flat-floored and relatively fresh crater during its Dec.
2004 Iapetus flyby (see PIA06171).
The mosaic consists of three image footprints across the surface of
Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across). The view is centered on
terrain near 43.3 degrees north latitude, 138 degrees west longitude.
Image scale is approximately 75 meters (246 feet) per pixel.
The clear spectral filter images in this mosaic were obtained with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 10, 2007, at a distance of
approximately 13,500 kilometers (8,400 miles) from Iapetus and at a
sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 139 degrees.
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.
