Slice of Tethys

This Cassini view of Saturn's moon Tethys shows several large craters near the moon's eastern limb. These craters have fanciful names such as Phemius, Polyphemus and Ajax. The moon's massive rift-like canyon system, Ithaca Chasma, is in the darkness to the west. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.

The image has been rotated so that north on Tethys is up. This view shows mainly the moon's trailing hemisphere.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Jan. 19, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 111 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute