Distant Moon

With nearby Saturn looming large, the Cassini spacecraft spies the bright distant moon Tethys in the icy blackness beyond.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 15 degrees above the ringplane.

Tethys is 1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles, across.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 13, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (836,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 81 kilometers (50 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