Quiet and cold, a crescent Tethys floats above the nearly edge-on rings of
Saturn. The only surface features visible on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or
665 miles across) from this distance are a few impact craters.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 22, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3
million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115 degrees. The image scale is
18 kilometers (11 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
