Saturn's moon Tethys displays its distinctive dark equatorial band here,
along with two sizeable impact craters in the west. The larger crater to
the north is Odysseus, which has a diameter (450 kilometers or 280 miles
across) that is a substantial fraction of the moon's width. Tethys is
1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.
Several moons in the outer solar system have large impact features like
Odysseus, and scientists are interested in learning how such powerful
impacts have altered the moons' surfaces.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 10, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.8
million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 11
kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor
of two to aid visibility.
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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
