This view of Saturn's moon Tethys shows the contrast between the more
heavily cratered region near the top and the more lightly cratered (and
presumably younger) plains toward the bottom part of the image and near
the limb. Some of the larger craters in the latter region appear to be
somewhat subdued or filled in. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles)
across.
This view shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Tethys. North
is up and tilted 20 degrees to the left.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 9, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet
light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 200,000 kilometers (127,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 120 degrees. Resolution in the
image is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) per pixel.
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.
