A close inspection of this image reveals that there is more of Saturn's
moon Tethys here than is apparent at first glance. A slim crescent is all
that is visible of the moon's sunlit side, but the left half of the image
is dimly lit by "Saturnshine," or reflected light from the planet lying
off to the left of Cassini's field of view. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers
(665 miles) across.
On occasion, useful details about a moon's surface characteristics can be
revealed under such dim illumination, as in PIA06168.
This view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Tethys; north
is up. Craters along the terminator, the boundary between day and night,
are Penelope (at the top) and Antinous (at the bottom).
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Aug. 3, 2005. The spacecraft was approximately 842,000 kilometers (523,000
miles) from Tethys. The image was taken with a filter sensitive to
wavelengths of polarized ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers
from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 144
degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.
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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.
