Cassini looks into the 245-kilometer (150-mile) wide crater Melanthius in
this view of the southern terrain on Tethys. The crater possesses a
prominent cluster of peaks in its center which are relics of its
formation.
Notable here is a distinct boundary in crater abundance -- the cratering
density is much higher in the farthest western terrain (left side of the
image) than elsewhere.
North on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) is up and rotated
45 degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately
120,000 kilometers (75,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Image scale is 715
meters (2,345 feet) 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.
