Tethys has a crater-saturated surface, where older, larger basins have been completely overprinted by newer, smaller impacts. This state is what scientists expect to see on a very old surface, where small impactors have struck more frequently than larger ones over several billion years. Larger impacts were more common events in the early history of the solar system.

This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). North is up. The great scar of Ithaca Chasma is seen at right.

The view was captured in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately 449,000 kilometers (279,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 49 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.