Saturn and Tethys

Saturn poses with Tethys in this Cassini view. The C ring casts thin, string-like shadows on the northern hemisphere. Above that lurks the shadow of the much denser B ring. Cloud bands in the atmosphere are subtly visible in the south. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.

Cassini will perform a close flyby of Tethys on Sept. 24, 2005.

The image was taken on June 10, 2005, in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 81 kilometers (50 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