This stunning close-up view shows mountainous terrain that reaches about
10 kilometers (6 miles) high along the unique equatorial ridge of Iapetus. The view was acquired during Cassini's only close flyby of the two-toned Saturn moon.
Above the middle of the image can be seen a place where an impact has
exposed the bright ice beneath the dark overlying material.
The image was taken on Sept. 10, 2007, with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 3,870 kilometers (2,400
miles) from Iapetus. Image scale is 23 meters (75 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.
