A Little Off the Top

The huge Odysseus Crater disfigures the face of Saturn's moon Tethys.

The crater, in the top right of the image, is 450 kilometers, or 280 miles, across (see PIA07693 for more information). This view is centered on terrain at 42 degrees south latitude, 108 degrees west longitude. The south pole of Tethys lies on the terminator about a quarter of the way inward from the bottom of the image.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 24, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 933,000 kilometers (580,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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.