Following Cassini's highly successful flyby of Iapetus in September 2007,
the spacecraft repeatedly glanced back at the two-toned moon for some
time. As Cassini receded from Iapetus, more and more of the bright
trailing hemisphere rotated into view.
This image shows terrain farther west of that visible in PIA08384. Most
notably in this view, it can be seen that the dark equatorial terrain
reaches onto the moon's trailing side by the same amount on the western
and eastern sides.
This view looks toward Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles, across)
from about 10 degrees south of the moon's equator and is centered on 284
degrees west longitude. North is up and rotated 16 degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 19, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Iapetus and
at a sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 32 degrees. Image scale is
10 kilometers (6 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
