Cassini zooms in, for the first time, on the patchy, bright and dark
mountains originally identified in images from the NASA Voyager spacecraft
taken more than 25 years earlier. The image was acquired during Cassini's
only close flyby of Iapetus, a two-toned moon of Saturn.
The terrain seen here is located on the equator of Iapetus at
approximately 199 degrees west longitude, in the transition region between
the moon's bright and dark hemispheres. North is up.
The image was taken on Sept. 10, 2007, with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 9,240 kilometers (5,740
miles) from Iapetus. Image scale is 55 meters (180 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.