The Cassini spacecraft surveys the battered surface of icy Tethys. The
great impact basin straddling the terminator is itself overprinted by many
smaller impact sites.
The view in this image is toward the southern hemisphere on the moon's
Saturn-facing side. North on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles
across) is up and rotated 7 degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 11, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 559,000 kilometers (347,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 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.