Rough Sphere of Tethys

The Sun's rays strike the terrains near the terminator on Tethys at low angles, throwing features there into sharp relief. The cluster of peaks at the center of the crater Odysseus (450 kilometers, or 280 miles across) is particularly bold. Melanthius crater is seen here at bottom.

This view shows the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). North is up and rotated 20 degrees to the left. Saturn's rings cut across the upper left portion of the scene.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2005 at a distance of approximately 646,000 kilometers (401,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. The image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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