Around the equator on its leading side, Tethys wears a band of slightly
darker surface material. Cassini imaging scientists suspect that the
darkened region may represent an area of less contaminated ice with
differently sized grains than the material at higher latitudes on either
side of the band.
Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Tethys (1071
kilometers, or 665 miles across). North is up. Part of the great canyon
system Ithaca Chasma can be seen near the eastern limb in this
frame-filling view.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Sept. 30, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 186,000 kilometers (116,000 miles) from Tethys
and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 62 degrees. Image scale
is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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.