The Cassini spacecraft stares directly into the great Odysseus impact
basin on Tethys. Peaks near the crater's center cast long shadows toward
the east. The elevated eastern rim of the crater catches sunlight, despite
being well beyond the terminator.
See PIA07693 for a highly detailed view of Odysseus.
Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Tethys (1,071
kilometers, or 665 miles across) -- the side that always faces away from
Saturn. North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.1
million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Tethys. Image scale is 7
kilometers (4 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.