Squinting at Telesto

The blob of light seen here is Saturn's moon Telesto, which shares its orbital path with much larger Tethys. Telesto is 24 kilometers (15 miles) across.

Although this view may hint at a flattened, potato-like shape for Telesto (a common shape for Saturn's smaller moons), no features on the moon's surface can be resolved here.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately 768,000 kilometers (477,000 miles) from Telesto and at a Sun-Telesto-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of four to aid visibility.

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