Hyperion’s Pitted Surface

Saturn's moon Hyperion
November 14, 2006
PIA NumberPIA08309
Language
  • english

This color view of Hyperion shows off the dark pits that cover this strangely shaped moon.

At 280 kilometers (174 miles) across, Hyperion is the largest of Saturn's irregularly shaped moons. See Rosy Tan Moon for another color view.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 10, 2006 at a distance of approximately 998,000 kilometers (620,000 miles) from Hyperion. 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute