Eye of Tethys

April 12, 2005

Saturn's moon Tethys turns like a great eye as the enormous crater Odysseus (450 kilometers or 280 miles across) rotates into NASA's Cassini spacecraft's view.

Saturn's moon Tethys turns like a great eye as the enormous crater Odysseus (450 kilometers or 280 miles across) rotates into Cassini's view. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 6, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Tethys and from a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 35 degrees. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced 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 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Eye of Tethys

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