Speeding Away from Tethys

This view Saturn's icy moon Tethys shows a large crater with a central peak in the southern hemisphere. Other surface details of this heavily cratered surface are faintly visible. At the time this image was taken, Cassini was speeding away from the Saturn system on its initial long, looping orbit.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on July 13, 2004. Cassini was 4.8 million kilometers (3 million miles) from Tethys. Tethys, pronounced "TEE-thiss," has a diameter of 1,060 kilometers (659 miles). The Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase angle of the images is 97 degrees. The image scale is 29 kilometers (18 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.