Odysseus the Great

Saturn's moon Tethys
July 8, 2008
PIA NumberPIA10420
Language
  • english

Tethys sports an enormous impact basin, Odysseus. The impact basin is 450-kilometers (280-miles) wide and contains a central complex of mountains.

See The Great Basin for a close-up view of Odysseus.

Lit terrain seen here is on leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 31, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 717,000 kilometers (446,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 59 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (3 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