Profile of Odysseus

The profile of the 450-kilometer-wide (280-mile) crater Odysseus makes this image look as if someone sliced off a chunk of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). According to measurements made in Voyager images, the crater rim rises to about 5 kilometers (3 miles) above the surrounding terrain.

This view shows territory eastward of a previously released Cassini view that looked more directly into the giant impact basin (see Texture of Tethys). The moon's equatorial dark band can be seen here as well.

This view shows principally the southern leading hemisphere of Tethys. North is up and rotated 10 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 31, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 18 degrees. The image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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