Strange Hyperion

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Caption:

This unusual view of Saturn's moon Hyperion (266 kilometers, 165 miles across) shows just how strangely shaped this tumbling little moon is. Hyperion is the largest of Saturn's irregularly-shaped moons.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Dec. 10, 2004, at a distance of 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 68 degrees. The image scale is about 21 kilometers (13 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast enhanced to aid visibility.

Background Info:

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

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