Cold Light from Afar

Cassini peers toward the distant, icy plains of Saturn's moon Tethys. The planet's A and F rings slice across the top of this view.

This view of Tethys represents "Target 2" in the fall 2009 edition of the Cassini Scientist for a Day contest. (See http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/education/scientistforaday8thedition/.) The contest is designed to give students a taste of life as a scientist by challenging them to write an essay describing the value of one target choice among three for Cassini to image.

Images taken using red, blue and green spectral filters were combined to create this color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini wide-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2009 at a distance of 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Tethys.

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.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/.