Spotlight on Penelope

The Cassini spacecraft spies the large Penelope crater on Saturn's moon Tethys.

Penelope crater lies near the center of the image. See PIA11495 to learn more about the prominent features on Tethys. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). North on Tethys is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 14, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 256,000 kilometers (159,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 1 degree. Image scale is 2 kilometers (about 1 mile) 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.