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PIA06558: Tethys' Great Rift
This dazzling view of Tethys from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the tremendous rift called Ithaca Chasma, which is 100 kilometers (60 miles) wide in places, and runs nearly three-fourths of the way around the icy moon.
 Target Name:  Tethys
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens 
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle 
 Product Size:  585 x 578 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  CICLOPS/Space Science Institute 
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA06558.tif (76.23 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA06558.jpg (11.92 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

This dazzling view of Tethys shows the tremendous rift called Ithaca Chasma, which is 100 kilometers (60 miles) wide in places, and runs nearly three-fourths of the way around the icy moon. Tethys is 1,060 kilometers (659 miles) across.

Adjacent to the great Chasma is a large multi-ring impact basin with a diameter of about 300 kilometers (185 miles). The inner ring of the basin is about 130 kilometers (80 miles) in diameter. The moon's heavily cratered face is indicative of an ancient surface.

This view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Tethys. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Dec. 15, 2004, at a distance of approximately 560,000 kilometers (348,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 91 degrees. The image scale is about 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 Cassini-Huygens 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2004-12-17