Tethys Before Titan

Terrain on Saturn's moon Tethys, defined with craters, is shown in front of the hazy atmosphere of the larger moon Titan in this Cassini spacecraft image.

Titan is 5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles, across. Tethys is 1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles, across. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing sides of Titan and Tethys.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 17, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Tethys and 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Titan. Image scale is 12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Tethys and 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Titan.

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