Sunlight strikes the terminator (the boundary between day and night)
region on Saturn's moon Iapetus at nearly horizontal angles, making
visible the vertical relief of many features.
This view is centered on terrain in the southern hemisphere of Iapetus
(1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across). Lit terrain visible here is on
the moon's leading hemisphere. In this image, a large, central-peaked
crater is notable at the boundary between the dark material in Cassini
Regio and the brighter material on the trailing hemisphere.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 22, 2006, at a distance of approximately 1.3
million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Iapetus and at a
Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 67 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The image has been
magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced 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 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.
