Gazing at Icy Canyons

The dramatic Ithaca Chasma carves an enormous gash for more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) across Saturn's moon Tethys. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across. Stretching across the top of this view are the B and A rings, separated by the Cassini Division.

Ithaca Chasma is on the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere. North on Tethys is up and rotated 15 degrees to the left in this view.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 24, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 87 degrees. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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