Dark material splatters the walls and floors of craters in the surreal,
frozen wastelands of Iapetus. This image shows terrain in the transition
region between the moon's dark leading hemisphere and its bright trailing
hemisphere. The view was acquired during Cassini's only close flyby of the
two-toned Saturn moon.
The image was taken on Sept. 10, 2007, with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 6,030 kilometers (3,750
miles) from Iapetus. Image scale is 36 meters (118 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/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.