- Original Caption Released with Image:
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Tethys floats before the massive, golden-hued globe of Saturn in this
natural color view. The thin, dark line of the rings curves around the
horizon at top.
Visible on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) are the craters
Odysseus (top) and Melanthius (bottom). The view looks toward the
anti-Saturn side of Tethys.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this color view. Tethys is apparently darker than Saturn at these
wavelengths. The edge of the planet appears fuzzy, which may indicate that
we are seeing haze layers that are separated from the main cloud deck.
The images were acquired by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Dec. 3, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.5 million kilometers (1.6
million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per
pixel on Saturn and 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Tethys.
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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
- Image Credit:
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NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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