PDS logoPlanetary Data System
PDS Information
Find a Node - Use these links to navigate to any of the 8 publicly accessible PDS Nodes.

This bar indicates that you are within the PDS enterprise which includes 6 science discipline nodes and 2 support nodes which are overseen by the Project Management Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Each node is led by an expert in the subject discipline, supported by an advisory group of other practitioners of that discipline, and subject to selection and approval under a regular NASA Research Announcement.
Click here to return to the Photojournal Home Page Click here to view a list of Photojournal Image Galleries Photojournal_inner_header
Latest Images  |  Spacecraft & Technology  |  Animations  |  Space Images App  |  Feedback  |  Photojournal Search  

PIA08177: Mysterious Iapetus
A distant glimpse of Iapetus reveals details within the dark terrain of Cassini Regio, including an impact basin at top that is roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles) wide. This is image is from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
 Target Name:  Iapetus
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens 
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle 
 Product Size:  288 x 311 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team 
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA08177.tif (89.89 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA08177.jpg (4.672 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:

A distant glimpse of Iapetus reveals details within the dark terrain of Cassini Regio, including an impact basin at top that is roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles) wide.

Researchers remain unsure about the mechanism that has darkened the leading hemisphere.

This view looks toward the southern hemisphere on the leading side of Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 4, 2006, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Iapetus. The image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2006-05-12