Impact on the Ice

The enormous impact basin Odysseus sits on the eastern limb of icy Tethys.
This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). North is toward the top of the picture.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 14, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (714,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 7 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