Odysseus in the Light

The Cassini spacecraft looks down onto high northern latitudes on Tethys, spying the enormous impact basin Odysseus.

Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). North is towards the top of the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 11, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 765,000 kilometers (475,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 97 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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