A distant glimpse of Iapetus reveals details within the dark terrain of
Cassini Regio, including an impact basin at top that is roughly 400
kilometers (250 miles) wide.
Researchers remain unsure about the mechanism that has darkened the
leading hemisphere.
This view looks toward the southern hemisphere on the leading side of
Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across). North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 4, 2006, at a distance of approximately 1.4
million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Iapetus. The image scale is 9
kilometers (6 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.