The terminator between shadow and light cuts across a large crater in the
high southern latitudes of the moon Tethys.
Also visible near the terminator on the left of the image is a portion of
the Ithaca Chasma, a chasm that runs north-south for more than 1,000
kilometers (620 miles). This view looks toward the south pole of Tethys,
and the pole lies on the terminator between the crater and the chasm.
Lit terrain seen here is mostly on the trailing hemisphere of Tethys
(1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across). The image was taken in visible light
with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 16, 2009. The view
was acquired at a distance of approximately 873,000 kilometers (542,000
miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 96
degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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.