This dramatic close-up of Tethys shows the large crater Penelope lying
near center, overprinted by many smaller, younger impact sites.
Three smaller impact features of roughly similar size make a line left of
Penelope that runs north-south: (from bottom) Ajax, Polyphemus and
Phemius.
Features on Tethys are named for characters and places from "The Iliad"
and "The Odyssey." The largest impact structure on Tethys is named
Odysseus. (See PIA07693 for a stunning close-up of Odysseus.)
The view is toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Tethys (1,071
kilometers, or 665 miles across). North is up.
The image was taken in polarized ultraviolet light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 25, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 165,000 kilometers (103,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 23 degrees. Image scale is 984
meters (3,227 feet) 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
