With this full-disk mosaic, Cassini presents the best view yet of the
south pole of Saturn's moon Tethys.
The giant rift Ithaca Chasma cuts across the disk. Much of the topography
seen here, including that of Ithaca Chasma, has a soft, muted appearance.
It is clearly very old and has been heavily bombarded by impacts over
time.
Many of the fresh-appearing craters (ones with crisp relief) exhibit
unusually bright crater floors. The origin of the apparent brightness (or
"albedo") contrast is not known. It is possible that impacts punched
through to a brighter layer underneath, or perhaps it is brighter because
of different grain sizes or textures of the crater floor material in
comparison to material along the crater walls and surrounding surface.
The moon's high southern latitudes, seen here at the bottom, were not
imaged by NASA's Voyager spacecraft during their flybys of Tethys 25
years ago.
The mosaic is composed of nine images taken during Cassini's close flyby
of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) on Sept. 24, 2005,
during which the spacecraft passed approximately 1,500 kilometers (930
miles) above the moon's surface.
This view is centered on terrain at approximately 1.2 degrees south
latitude and 342 degrees west longitude on Tethys. It has been rotated so
that north is up.
The clear filter images in this mosaic were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera at distances ranging from 71,600 kilometers
(44,500 miles) to 62,400 kilometers (38,800 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. The image scale is
370 meters (1,200 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
