This dazzling view of Tethys shows the tremendous rift called Ithaca
Chasma, which is 100 kilometers (60 miles) wide in places, and runs
nearly three-fourths of the way around the icy moon. Tethys is 1,060
kilometers (659 miles) across.
Adjacent to the great Chasma is a large multi-ring impact basin with a
diameter of about 300 kilometers (185 miles). The inner ring of the basin
is about 130 kilometers (80 miles) in diameter. The moon's heavily
cratered face is indicative of an ancient surface.
This view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Tethys. The
image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle
camera on Dec. 15, 2004, at a distance of approximately 560,000 kilometers
(348,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 91 degrees. The image scale is about 3 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 Cassini-Huygens 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 team
is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
