Old Northern Terrains

The northern polar region of Saturn's moon Tethys seen in this Cassini flyby image is a ponderously ancient surface.

Above the prominent peaked crater Telemachus are the remnants of a very old crater (at the 10 o'clock position relative to Telemachus) named Teiresias. The ancient impact site is so badly overprinted and eroded by impact weathering and degradation that all that remains is a circular pattern of hummocks that mark where the old crater rim existed.

This view is centered on terrain at approximately 1.2 degrees south latitude and 342 degrees west longitude on Tethys. The view is rotated so that north is about 40 degrees to the right.

This clear filter view was taken during Cassini's close approach to Tethys on Sept. 24, 2005. The image was acquired using the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 69,200 kilometers (43,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale is 410 meters (1,350 feet) 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