Calypso Close Up

The Cassini spacecraft's February 2010 encounter with Calypso yielded this incredibly detailed view of this Trojan moon.

Irregularly shaped Calypso is one of two Trojan moons of the larger moon Tethys; Calypso trails Tethys in its orbit by 60 degrees. See Colorful Cratered Calypso to learn more about Calypso and its fellow Tethys Trojan, Telesto. Like Telesto, Calypso's smooth surface does not appear to retain the record of intense cratering that most of Saturn's other moons possess (see Smooth Surface of Telesto).

This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Calypso (21 kilometers, or 13 miles across). North on Calypso is up and rotated 1 degree to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 13, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 21,000 kilometers (13,000 miles) from Calypso and at a Sun-Calypso-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. Scale in the original image was 128 meters (420 feet) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.

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