Line of Craters

The Cassini spacecraft takes a close look at a row of craters on Saturn's moon Tethys during the spacecraft's April 14, 2012, flyby of the moon.

Three large craters are visible along the terminator between day and night on Tethys (660 miles, or 1,062 kilometers across). The larger Odysseus crater also can be seen in profile on the right of the image. Odysseus Crater is 280 miles (450 kilometers) across. See The Great Basin for a closer view of Odysseus.

This view looks toward the area between the leading hemisphere and the anti-Saturn side of Tethys. North on Tethys is up and rotated 25 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 14, 2012. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 12,000 miles (20,000 kilometers) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 66 degrees. Image scale is a half mile (1 kilometer) 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

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

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute