The Cassini spacecraft spies four large impact basins on the southern
hemisphere of icy Tethys.
Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across), like the other airless
worlds of the Solar System, wears the record of countless impacts
experienced over the eons.
Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Tethys. North is up
and rotated 15 degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 21, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 452,000 kilometers (281,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 54 degrees. Image scale is 3
kilometers (2 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.