Cassini caught this glimpse of Hyperion as the moon tumbled chaotically
in its orbit around Saturn. Hyperion is a heavily cratered moon, and in
this image it shows a dark spot that may be one of its many large craters.
Hyperion's diameter is 266 kilometers (156 miles).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on September 12, 2004, at a distance of 8.8 million
kilometers (5.4 million miles) from Hyperion and at a
Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft or phase, angle of 90 degrees. The image scale is
53 kilometers (33 miles) per pixel. The image was magnified by a factor
of four to aid visibility.
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.
