This view of Tethys displays three of the moon's most notable surface
features. At upper left is the giant Odysseus impact basin. At lower right
is the great scar of Ithaca Chasma. Extending from east to west across the
moon is the great swath of terrain that appears slightly darker than the
rest of the moon's surface.
See PIA09766 for a different view of the dark belt.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Tethys (1,071 kilometers,
or 665 miles across) from 33 degrees above the equator. North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 14, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (715,000 miles) from Tethys and at
a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 70 degrees. 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.