Broad Impact on Tethys

The Odysseus Crater dominates this view of Saturn's moon Tethys.

The impact basin stretches 450 kilometers, or 280 miles, across Tethys which is itself 1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles, across. See The Great Basin to learn more.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Tethys. This view looks toward the moon's north pole which lies on the terminator above the crater in this image. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 14, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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