Ithaca Chasma rips across the cratered surface of Tethys, creating a scar
more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) long, from north to south.
Cassini got a closer look at this ancient rift during a Sept. 2005 flyby
of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). See PIA07734 for a
high-resolution view of the chasm.
This view shows the Saturn-facing side of Tethys. North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 21, 2006 at a distance of approximately
715,000 kilometers (444,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 48 degrees. Image scale is 4
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.
