Odysseus in Profile

Tethys' huge Odysseus Crater is brightly lit in the northern latitudes of this Saturnian moon in this Cassini spacecraft view.

The crater is seen almost edge-on in the upper left of the image. See The Great Basin for a closer view of this crater. Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). North on Tethys is up and rotated 1 degree to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 9, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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