Eye on Tethys

Tethys
August 6, 2009
PIA NumberPIA11552
Language
  • english

Appearing like an iris of a human eye, the huge Odysseus Crater dominates the sphere of the moon Tethys.

The Odysseus Crater is 450 kilometers, or 280 miles, across on Tethys, which is 1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles, across. Cassini looks down on Tethys' northern hemisphere in this view centered on terrain at 25 degrees north latitude, 54 degrees west longitude. North on Tethys is up and rotated 17 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. 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