Leading Hemisphere

The Cassini spacecraft presents a clear view of Tethys' equatorial band of dark terrain, along with the crater Odysseus.

This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). North is toward the top of the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 4, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (720,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 4 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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