Brightside in View

The Cassini spacecraft continues to image terrain on Iapetus that is progressively eastward of the terrain it has previously seen illuminated by sunlight.

The region seen here was imaged in reflected light from Saturn at excellent resolution in the close flyby on New Year's Eve 2004 (see Iapetus by Saturn Shine).

This view looks toward the equator of Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across) on the moon's Saturn-facing side. North is up and rotated 11 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Iapetus. Image scale is 12 kilometers (7 miles) 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