This Cassini spacecraft view shows how the bright and dark regions on
Iapetus fit together like the seams of a baseball. Some of the material
that covers the moon's dark, leading side spills over into regions on the
brighter trailing side, creating the feature near upper right referred to
by some scientists as "the Moat."
(See PIA06168 for a higher resolution view of this region.)
The large impact basin above center in the dark terrain has a diameter of
about 550 kilometers (340 miles).
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Iapetus (1,468
kilometers, or 912 miles across). North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.6
million kilometers (1 million miles) from Iapetus. Image scale is 9
kilometers (6 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.
