Magnificent Scars

The Cassini spacecraft provides a stunning view of the Odysseus impact basin on Tethys. The enormous basin is 450 kilometers (280 miles) wide.

The medium-sized crater Melanthius is seen along the terminator at lower left.

This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 21, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 211,000 kilometers (131,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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