Tethys Walks the Line

The moon Tethys cruises past, in front of Saturn's edge-on rings. The rings cast threadlike shadows onto the northern hemisphere of the planet.

The large crater Odysseus can be seen on the eastern limb of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across).

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 7, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of visible light centered at 619 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 49 kilometers (30 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