Ithaca Chasma rips across Tethys from north to south near the center of
this view. The moon's western limb is flattened, indicating the rim of the
giant impact basin Odysseus.
The dark, east-west trending band often observed in this region (see
PIA07571) is just visible here, but its contrast is reversed at these
short, ultraviolet wavelengths -- it is bright against the already bright
terrain.
North on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) is up and rotated
24 degrees to the left. This view looks toward the moon's Saturn-facing
hemisphere.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May
27, 2007 using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths
of light centered at 298 and 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 267,000 kilometers (166,000 miles) from Tethys
and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 13 degrees. Image scale
is 2 kilometers (5,236 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.