Band Becomes Bright

Ithaca Chasma rips across Tethys from north to south near the center of this view. The moon's western limb is flattened, indicating the rim of the giant impact basin Odysseus.

The dark, east-west trending band often observed in this region (see With the Band) is just visible here, but its contrast is reversed at these short, ultraviolet wavelengths -- it is bright against the already bright terrain.

North on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) is up and rotated 24 degrees to the left. This view looks toward the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 27, 2007 using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of light centered at 298 and 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 267,000 kilometers (166,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 13 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (5,236 feet) per pixel.

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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute