From a highly inclined orbit, the Cassini spacecraft looks toward far
northern latitudes on Tethys.
Here, the spacecraft was above a position about 45 degrees north of the
moon's equator. This vantage point afforded a view of the moon's three
most recognizable features: the Ithaca Chasma canyon system (at lower
right), Odysseus crater (at upper left) and the equatorial band of darker
terrain (at lower left).
Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,062
kilometers, or 660 miles across). North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 29, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 991,000 kilometers (616,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 73 degrees. Image scale is 6
kilometers (4 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.
