This high-resolution view shows a vast range of crater sizes in the dark
terrain of the leading hemisphere of Saturn's moon Iapetus.
Across the scene, a few small bright spots indicate fresh, rayed craters
where impactors have punched through the thin blanket of dark material to
the cleaner ice beneath.
The slight elevation on the bottom half of the image is part of the giant
equatorial ridge that spans a wide fraction of Iapetus' circumference. The
numerous craters on top of the ridge indicate that it is an old surface
feature.
The mosaic consists of three image footprints across the surface of
Iapetus. The view is centered on terrain near 0.5 degrees north latitude,
141.6 degrees west longitude. Image scale is approximately 22 meters (72
feet) per pixel. Illumination is from the left.
The clear spectral filter images in this mosaic were obtained with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 10, 2007, at a distance of
approximately 63,000 kilometers (39,000 miles) from Iapetus and at a
sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 125 degrees.
Iapetus is 1,468 kilometers (912 miles) across.
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.
