Southern Face of Tethys

Five hours after acquiring Ancient Rift, the Cassini spacecraft turned its cameras back to Tethys for a more southerly view. The southern reaches of Ithaca Chasma are seen here, along with the large crater Telemus just right of center.

Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). The view looks toward the southern hemisphere from a perspective 43 degrees south of the moon's equator. North is toward the top and rotated 30 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 28, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 313,000 kilometers (194,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 42 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 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