This view of the surface of Saturn's moon Tethys, taken during Cassini's
close approach to the moon on Sept. 24, 2005, reveals an icy land of steep
cliffs. The view is of the southernmost extent of Ithaca Chasma, in a
region not seen by NASA's Voyager spacecraft.
The ridges around Ithaca Chasma have been thoroughly hammered by impacts.
This appearance suggests that Ithaca Chasma as a whole is very old.
There is brighter material in the floors of many craters on Tethys. That's
the opposite situation from Saturn's oddly tumbling moon Hyperion, where
dark material is concentrated in the bottoms of many craters.
This view is centered on terrain at approximately 2.5 degrees south
latitude and 352 degrees west longitude on Tethys. North on Tethys is
toward the right in this view.
This clear filter view was obtained using the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 32,300 kilometers
(20,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 20 degrees. Image scale is 190 meters (620 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.