Hyperion: Parting Glance

As Cassini sped away from its close encounter with Saturn's moon Hyperion on Sept. 26, 2005, it took this parting shot of the battered moon's shadowy limb.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 32,300 kilometers (20,000 miles) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 127 degrees. Image scale is 192 meters (630 feet) 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