This mosaic of Cassini images shows the smallest details ever observed on
Saturn's moon Iapetus.
Visible here are small craters as well as the base of a large mountain
ridge located just south of the mosaic. At several places, bright spots
about 20 to 50 meters (66 to 164 feet) across are visible. At these
locations, more recent impactors have punched through the overlying
blanket of dark material to reveal brighter, cleaner ice beneath.
Since the bright craters are relatively small and very shallow, it is
likely that the dark blanket is rather thin in this area; it is assumed
that its actual average thickness might be on the order of a foot.
The small crater at the upper left edge of the mosaic has a diameter of
about 50 meters (164 feet) and shows a distinct ray pattern from excavated
ice. This feature is so bright in comparison to the dark surrounding
terrain that it had to be darkened manually so as not to look overexposed
in this mosaic.
The mosaic consists of eight image footprints across the surface of
Iapetus, presented here in simple cylindrical projection. The view is
centered on terrain near 0 degrees north latitude, 164.9 degrees west
longitude, within the dark leading hemisphere of Iapetus. Image scale is
approximately 10 meters (33 feet) per pixel.
The clear spectral filter images in this mosaic were obtained with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 10, 2007, at distances
ranging from 1,627 to 2,040 kilometers (1,011 to 1,268 miles) from
Iapetus.
Iapetus is 1,468 kilometers (912 miles) across.
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.