Banded Moon

In this infrared view, Saturn's cratered moon Tethys shows a faint, dark band across its equatorial region. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.

North is up in this view, which shows the leading hemisphere on Tethys.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 11, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (850,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 80 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and 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 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.