On the South Side

This Cassini spacecraft view looks almost directly at the south pole of Tethys. The large crater Melanthius is seen above center.

Tethys is 1,062 kilometers (660 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 18, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 357,000 kilometers (222,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 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