PIA08254: Toward Melanthius


Toward Melanthius

Caption:

Cassini looks into the 245-kilometer (150-mile) wide crater Melanthius in this view of the southern terrain on Tethys. The crater possesses a prominent cluster of peaks in its center which are relics of its formation.

Notable here is a distinct boundary in crater abundance -- the cratering density is much higher in the farthest western terrain (left side of the image) than elsewhere.

North on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) is up and rotated 45 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately 120,000 kilometers (75,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Image scale is 715 meters (2,345 feet) 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 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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Tethys
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Rotation, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2006-08-29
Date in Caption 2006-07-23
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08254
Identifier PIA08254