Odysseus Out of Shadow

The Cassini spacecraft stares directly into the great Odysseus impact basin on Tethys. Peaks near the crater's center cast long shadows toward the east. The elevated eastern rim of the crater catches sunlight, despite being well beyond the terminator.

See The Great Basin for a highly detailed view of Odysseus.

Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) -- the side that always faces away from Saturn. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Tethys. 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