Tethys’ Northern Crater

The Odysseus Crater sprawls across the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere of the moon Tethys.

The Odysseus Crater is 450 kilometers, or 280 miles, across. Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). This view looks down on the moon's north pole, which lies on the terminator about a quarter of the way inward from the top edge of the moon in the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 11, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 577,000 kilometers (359,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 65 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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