As it approached Saturn near the end of its second orbit, Cassini caught
this view of the small, irregularly shaped moon Hyperion (266 kilometers,
or 165 miles, across). The moon's long axis is nearly horizontal in this
view. The image shows parts of Hyperion's day and night sides.
Hyperion is a heavily cratered body, though Cassini's cameras were not
able to discern much detail from the distance at which the image was
taken. The spacecraft is slated to fly past the little moon at an
altitude of less than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) in late 2005, compared
with a distance of 5.9 million kilometers (3.7 million miles) between
Hyperion and Cassini when this image was taken.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Sep. 29, 2004, at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 75 degrees. The image scale is 35 kilometers (22 miles) per
pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of four 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
