Melanthius on Tethys

The large crater Melanthius near Tethys's south pole.
July 14, 2010
PIA NumberPIA12676
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The Cassini spacecraft looks toward an area between the trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of Tethys and spies the large crater Melanthius near the moon's south pole.

Melanthius, at the bottom of this image, is about 250 kilometers (155 miles) wide on Tethys. See On the South Side for another view. North on Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) is up and rotated 19 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 29, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 670,000 kilometers (416,000 miles) from Tethys and at a sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 41 degrees. Image scale is 4 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