PIA06622: Hanging Half-Moon


Hanging Half-Moon

Caption:

This Cassini image shows Saturn's crater-covered moon Tethys as it slid silently along in its orbit while Saturn's delicate rings sliced the view in two. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 23, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 78 degrees. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.

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 .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Tethys Saturn Rings
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Ring
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2005-04-07
Date in Caption 2005-02-23
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06622
Identifier PIA06622