The ancient gorge of Ithaca Chasma carves a path across Tethys and
continues out of sight over the moon's limb. This great rift is a system
of canyons that is 100 kilometers (60 miles) across on average, is 4
kilometers (2 miles) deep in places, and can be traced more than 1,000
kilometers (620 miles) over Tethys' surface, from north to south.
This view also shows the belt of darkened material that Tethys (1,071
kilometers, or 665 miles across) wears prominently on its leading
hemisphere. North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately
795,000 kilometers (494,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 99 degrees. Image scale is 5
kilometers (3 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.
