With nearby Saturn looming large, the Cassini spacecraft spies the bright
distant moon Tethys in the icy blackness beyond.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 15
degrees above the ringplane.
Tethys is 1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles, across.
The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on May 13, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 1.3 million kilometers (836,000 miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 81 kilometers (50 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.
