Pummeled Hyperion

Saturn's irregularly shaped moon Hyperion is completely covered with large pits from which much of its material has been blasted by impacts, never to return. The moon's surface gravity is so low that crater-ejected material often escapes Hyperion entirely.

Hyperion is 280 kilometers (174 miles) across on average.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 21, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 151,000 kilometers (94,000 miles) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 111 degrees. Image scale is 906 meters (0.6 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