The Cassini spacecraft views terrain on the bright, trailing side of
Iapetus in natural color. This side of Iapetus starkly contrasts with the
much darker leading hemisphere, and some of the dark material seen here in
association with craters near the terminator is an extension of the
leading hemisphere terrain.
This region was previously imaged by the spacecraft at a much finer
resolution -- a spatial scale of less than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) per
pixel -- during a flyby at the close of 2004. This terrain was then on the
moon's night side at the time, and Cassini imaged it using weak, reflected
light from Saturn (see PIA06168).
The present view looks toward Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles
across) from about 24 degrees above the moon's equator.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 15, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Iapetus and
at a Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 66 degrees. Scale in the
original images is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel. The view has been
magnified by a factor of three.
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.
