Cassini offers up this nice view of the craters Odysseus (at the top) and
Melanthius (at the bottom) on Saturn's moon Tethys. Melanthius appears to
have an elongated mountain range, rather than a single central peak, at
its center.
This is the trailing hemisphere of Tethys, being centered on terrain at
roughly 270 degrees longitude. North on Tethys is up. The diameter of
Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles).
This image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Sept. 20, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet
light centered at 338 nanometers. This view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The image has been
magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.
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.
