Somewhat Flattened South

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the flattened south pole of Saturn's small moon Epimetheus.

To learn more about the shape of the southern part of this moon, see Epimetheus Revealed.

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across). This view is centered on 23 degrees south latitude, 300 degrees west longitude. The moon's south pole lies near the shadow of what may be an impact crater seen at the bottom of the image.

Scale in the original image was 4 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 25, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 713,000 kilometers (443,000 miles) from Epimetheus and at a Sun-Epimetheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 49 degrees.

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