Appearing like an iris of a human eye, the huge Odysseus Crater dominates
the sphere of the moon Tethys.
The Odysseus Crater is 450 kilometers, or 280 miles, across on Tethys,
which is 1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles, across. Cassini looks down on
Tethys' northern hemisphere in this view centered on terrain at 25 degrees
north latitude, 54 degrees west longitude. North on Tethys is up and
rotated 17 degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Tethys and at a
Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 6
kilometers (4 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.