NASA Cassini Image: North and South on Tethys
This view of Saturn’s moon Tethys shows the contrast between the more heavily cratered region near the top and the more lightly cratered (and presumably younger) plains toward the bottom part of the image and near the limb. Some of the larger craters in the latter region appear to be somewhat subdued or filled in. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.
This view shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Tethys. North is up and tilted 20 degrees to the left.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 9, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 200,000 kilometers (127,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 120 degrees. Resolution in the image is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
