Colorful Cratered Calypso

This color image provides the best look yet at Saturn's moon Calypso, a Trojan (trailing moon) of the larger moon Tethys. Calypso trails Tethys in its orbit by 60 degrees.

Telesto is the other Tethys Trojan, orbiting Saturn 60 degrees ahead of Tethys.

Calypso is 22 kilometers (14 miles) across. Calypso, like many other small Saturnian moons and small asteroids, is irregularly shaped by overlapping large craters. Although the resolution here is not as high as in Cassini's best images of Pandora and Telesto, this moon appears to also have loose surface material capable of smoothing the appearance of craters.

Images taken using ultraviolet, green and infrared spectral filters were combined to create this false-color view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 23, 2005, at a distance of approximately 101,000 kilometers (63,000 miles) from Calypso and at a Sun-Calypso-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 61 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 602 meters (1,976 feet) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of three 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