The many impact scars borne by Iapetus are made far more conspicuous in
the region of transition from its dark hemisphere to its bright one. In
this terrain, the dark material that coats Cassini Regio accentuates
slopes and crater floors, creating a land of stark contrasts.
North on Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across) is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 6, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.2
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Iapetus and at a
Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 13
kilometers (8 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
