Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

Big Bangs on Tethys

Caption: Cassini offers up this nice view of the craters Odysseus (top) and Melanthius (bottom) on Tethys. Melanthius appears to have an elongated mountain range, rather than a single central peak, at its center.

This is the trailing hemisphere of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, 665 miles across), being centered on terrain at roughly 270 degrees longitude. North on Tethys is up.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera on Sept. 20, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained from a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Usage Restrictions: Image is in the public domain. Appropriate credit is requested.