Soaring above the alien, icy wastelands of Saturn's moon Iapetus, NASA's
Cassini spacecraft captured a series of high-resolution images of the
transition region from dark to bright terrain at southern middle latitudes
that have been mosaicked together in this view.
An important characteristic of the terrain in the boundary region is that
the isolated bright patches are mainly found on slopes facing toward the
bright trailing hemisphere or toward the south pole. The same polarity is
found within the bright terrain, where the dark material can be seen at
the bottom of craters and on equator-facing slopes. These indicate that
thermal effects are at play in painting the surface of Iapetus, 1,468
kilometers (912 miles) across.
The mosaic consists of eight image footprints across the surface of
Iapetus. The view is centered on terrain near 38.6 degrees south latitude,
171.3 degrees west longitude. Image scale is approximately 52 meters (171
feet) per pixel.
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 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) from Iapetus.
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.
