Chasma Crescent

Sunlight illuminates the deep cut of Ithaca Chasma on Saturn's moon Tethys.

Ithaca Chasma runs roughly north-south for more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) on Tethys. See Steep Scarps for a closer view.

Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). North on Tethys is up and rotated 18 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 2, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 477,000 kilometers (296,000 miles) from Tethys and at a sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 127 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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