At high resolution, terrain in the transition region between bright and
dark hemispheres on Saturn's moon Iapetus reveals a spotty appearance
reminiscent of a Dalmatian. The bright material on the frozen surface of
Iapetus, 1,468 kilometers (912 miles) across, is water ice, and the dark
material is likely carbonaceous in composition.
The dark material is preferentially found at the bottoms of craters.
Bright water ice forms the "bed rock" on Iapetus, while the dark,
presumably loose material apparently lies on top of the ice.
The terrain seen here is also visible in PIA08383, but it is viewed here
at higher resolution.
The mosaic consists of two image footprints across the surface of Iapetus.
The view is centered on terrain near 42 degrees south latitude and 209.3
degrees west longitude, on the anti-Saturn facing hemisphere. Image scale
is approximately 32 meters (105 feet) per pixel.
The clear spectral filter images in this mosaic were obtained with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 10, 2007, at distances
ranging from 5,363 to 5,884 kilometers (3,332 to 3,656 miles) from Iapetus.
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.
