The dramatic Ithaca Chasma carves an enormous gash for more than 1,000
kilometers (620 miles) across Saturn's moon Tethys. Tethys is 1,071
kilometers (665 miles) across. Stretching across the top of this view are
the B and A rings, separated by the Cassini Division.
Ithaca Chasma is on the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere. North on Tethys
is up and rotated 15 degrees to the left in this view.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 24, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.2
million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 87 degrees. The image scale is
13 kilometers (8 miles) 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.
