Distant Moons

Saturn's moons Tethys and Hyperion appear to be near neighbors in this Cassini view, even though they are actually 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) apart here. Tethys is the larger body on the left.

These two icy moons of Saturn are very different worlds. To learn more about Hyperion (170 miles or 270 kilometers across), see Odd Hyperion; to learn more about Tethys (660 miles or 1,062 kilometers across) see Dark Belt of Tethys.

This view looks toward the trailing side of Tethys. North on Tethys is up and rotated 1 degree to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 15, 2015.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Tethys. Image scale is 4.4 miles (7.0 kilometers) per pixel. The distance to Hyperion was 1.7 million miles (2.7 million kilometers) with an image scale of 10 mile (16 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute