Crater and Canyon

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Caption:

The prominent crater Telemachus sits within the northern reaches of Ithaca Chasma on Saturn's moon Tethys.

Ithaca Chasma is an enormous rift that stretches more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from north to south across Tethys.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) from a position 55 degrees north of the moon's equator. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 24, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 151,000 kilometers (94,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 61 degrees. Image scale is 903 meters (2,962 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/ . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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