The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the flattened south pole of Saturn's
small moon Epimetheus.
To learn more about the shape of the southern part of this moon, see PIA09813.
Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Epimetheus (113
kilometers, or 70 miles across). This view is centered on 23 degrees south
latitude, 300 degrees west longitude. The moon's south pole lies near the
shadow of what may be an impact crater seen at the bottom of the image.
Scale in the original image was 4 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel. The
image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid
visibility. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 25, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 713,000 kilometers (443,000 miles) from Epimetheus and at
a Sun-Epimetheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 49 degrees.
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.