This is Cassini's best look yet at the Trojan moon Telesto (24 kilometers,
or 15 miles across), which orbits Saturn about 60 degrees ahead of the
much larger Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). Calypso (22
kilometers, or 14 miles across, and not seen here) is the other Tethys
Trojan, and trails the larger moon by 60 degrees. Trojan moons are found
near gravitationally stable points ahead or behind a larger moon.
Cassini is able to partly resolve Telesto's shape in this view, but
surface features are too small to be visible from this distance.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately
533,000 kilometers (331,000 miles) from Telesto. The image scale is 3
kilometers (2 miles) per pixel. This view of Telesto has been magnified
by a factor of three and sharpened 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, 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.
