Bright Penelope

The Cassini spacecraft looks down on the north of Tethys and sees brightly illuminated Penelope Crater on the trailing hemisphere of the moon.

Penelope Crater, which lies on the opposite side of the moon from the huge Odysseus Crater, is faintly visible in the brightly lit area at the bottom left of this image. This view is centered on terrain at 51 degrees north latitude, 239 degrees west longitude. The north pole of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) lies on the terminator on the right about a quarter of the way inward from the top.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 27, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 465,000 kilometers (289,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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