Tethys and Rings

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Caption:

Two large impact basins, including the 450-kilometer-wide (280-mile) Odysseus basin (at the top), mark the face of Saturn's moon Tethys. The outer edge of Saturn's rings is visible at the lower right.

Just discernible is a slight north-south difference in brightness across Tethys' surface. North on Tethys is up and tilted about 20 degrees to the left. This view shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Tethys. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 3, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase angle of 80 degrees. The image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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 . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

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