Like a half-full moon, cratered Tethys hangs before the Cassini spacecraft
in this narrow angle camera view taken on July 3, 2004.
Voyager images showed a large fracture on Tethys about 750 kilometers
(470 miles) long (not seen in this view). Cassini will investigate this
and other features on Tethys during two planned flybys, the first
occurring on September 24, 2005. Tethys is 1,060 kilometers (659 miles)
across.
The image was taken in visible light from a distance of 1.7 million
kilometers (1 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft,
or phase angle of about 97 degrees. The image scale is 10 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.