PIA12676: Melanthius on Tethys


Melanthius on Tethys

Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward an area between the trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of Tethys and spies the large crater Melanthius near the moon's south pole.

Melanthius, at the bottom of this image, is about 250 kilometers (155 miles) wide on Tethys. See PIA10412 for another view. North on Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) is up and rotated 19 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 29, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 670,000 kilometers (416,000 miles) from Tethys and at a sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 41 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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 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 .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Tethys Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Planet
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 2010-07-14
Date in Caption 2010-04-29
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12676
Identifier PIA12676