This view shows one of the huge impact basins on the terminator of
Saturn's moon Iapetus and a smaller, but still fairly large, crater near
the southern bright-dark boundary. Just visible near the western limb, in
the dark territory of Cassini Regio, is the moon's mysterious equatorial
ridge. The ridge was discovered in Cassini images (see PIA06166) and
reaches 20 kilometers (12 miles) high in places.
This view shows principally the leading hemisphere on Iapetus. North is up
and tilted 15 degrees to the right. Iapetus is 1,468 kilometers (912
miles) across.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 19, 2005, through spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (880,000 miles) from
Iapetus and at a Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 70 degrees.
Resolution in the original image was 8 kilometers (5 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 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.
