Broken Ice

The Cassini spacecraft takes in a southern view of the scarred face of icy Tethys.

The moon's south pole is at bottom center, just above the terminator. To the left of the pole is the crater Melanthius, with its complex of central peaks poking upward into sunlight. On the limb at right, Ithaca Chasma extends northward. The smoothness of the limb is interrupted at the 11 o'clock position by the rim of the crater Odysseus. A belt of darker terrain girdles the moon's equator.

This is a similar view to that shown in PIA09918.

This view shows terrain to the west of that seen in the earlier image.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across). North is up and rotated 9 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 10, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 477,000 kilometers (296,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 44 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) 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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.