Weak sunlight illuminates Saturn's large, icy moon Tethys and its giant
crater Odysseus.
At the orbit of Saturn the Sun's light is between 80 and 100 times fainter
than at Earth, depending on where the planet is in its eccentric (out of
round) orbit, making high noon on Tethys like twilight on Earth.
This view looks toward the northern hemisphere of Tethys (1,062
kilometers, or 660 miles across) on the moon's anti-Saturn side. North is
up and rotated 10 degrees to the right.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
June 21, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 770,000 kilometers (479,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Image scale is 5
kilometers (3 miles) 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.