Cassini looks toward Tethys and its great crater Odysseus, while at the
same time capturing veiled Titan in the distance (at left).
Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is shrouded in a thick,
smog-like atmosphere in which many small, potential impactors burn up
before hitting the moon's surface. Crater-pocked Tethys (1,071 kilometers,
or 665 miles across) has no such protective layer, although even a thick
blanket of atmosphere would have done little good against the impactor
that created Odysseus.
The eastern limb of Tethys is overexposed in this view.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 6, 2006, at a distance of approximately 4
million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Titan and 2.7 million
kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 25
kilometers (16 miles) per pixel on Titan and 16 kilometers (10 miles) per
pixel on Tethys.
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.
