Tethys has a crater-saturated surface, where older, larger basins have
been completely overprinted by newer, smaller impacts. This state is what
scientists expect to see on a very old surface, where small impactors have
struck more frequently than larger ones over several billion years. Larger
impacts were more common events in the early history of the solar system.
This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,071 kilometers,
or 665 miles across). North is up. The great scar of Ithaca Chasma is seen
at right.
The view was captured in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately
449,000 kilometers (279,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 49 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.