Crater Chasm Combo

The terminator between shadow and light cuts across a large crater in the high southern latitudes of the moon Tethys.

Also visible near the terminator on the left of the image is a portion of the Ithaca Chasma, a chasm that runs north-south for more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). This view looks toward the south pole of Tethys, and the pole lies on the terminator between the crater and the chasm.

Lit terrain seen here is mostly on the trailing hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across). The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 16, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 873,000 kilometers (542,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 96 degrees. Image scale is 5 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