Cratered Crescent

Quiet and cold, a crescent Tethys floats above the nearly edge-on rings of Saturn. The only surface features visible on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) from this distance are a few impact craters.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 22, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115 degrees. The image scale is 18 kilometers (11 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 .

Credit:NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute