Somersaulting Moon

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Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft captures a view of Saturn's tumbling moon Hyperion.

To learn more about this spongy moon and how it tumbles in its orbit, see PIA06243 , PIA07761 and PIA07740 .

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 28, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 80,000 kilometers (50,000 miles) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 98 degrees. Image scale is 476 meters (1,562 feet) per pixel.

[Caption updated Oct. 24, 2011.]

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/ . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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