In this infrared view, Saturn's cratered moon Tethys shows a faint, dark
band across its equatorial region. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles)
across.
North is up in this view, which shows the leading hemisphere on Tethys.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 11, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 1.4 million kilometers (850,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 80 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The image has been
contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two 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 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 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.