Icy Old Moon

This Cassini spacecraft image provides a view of the southern portion of Tethys' trailing hemisphere.

Prominent features include the huge canyon, Ithaca Chasma, approximately centered in this view, as well as Demodocus and Telemus, large basins just to the right of the rift.

Features on Tethys are named for characters in Homer's Odyssey.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 10, 2008 at a distance of approximately 417,000 kilometers (259,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 55 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (2 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