As Cassini sped away from its close encounter with Saturn's moon Hyperion
on Sept. 26, 2005, it took this parting shot of the battered moon's
shadowy limb.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 32,300 kilometers
(20,000 miles) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 127 degrees. Image scale is 192 meters (630 feet) 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.