Penelope Crater

April 4, 2006

This dramatic close-up from NASA's Cassini spacecraft of Saturn's moon Tethys shows the large crater Penelope lying near center, overprinted by many smaller, younger impact sites.

This dramatic close-up of Tethys shows the large crater Penelope lying near center, overprinted by many smaller, younger impact sites.

Three smaller impact features of roughly similar size make a line left of Penelope that runs north-south: (from bottom) Ajax, Polyphemus and Phemius.

Features on Tethys are named for characters and places from "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." The largest impact structure on Tethys is named Odysseus. (See PIA07693 for a stunning close-up of Odysseus.)

The view is toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken in polarized ultraviolet light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately 165,000 kilometers (103,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 23 degrees. Image scale is 984 meters (3,227 feet) 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Penelope Crater

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