CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Big Bangs on Tethys

Cassini offers up this nice view of the craters Odysseus (top) and Melanthius (bottom) on Tethys. Melanthius appears to have an elongated mountain range, rather than a single central peak, at its center.

This view is centered on terrain at about 1 degree north latitude, 166 degrees west longitude of Tethys. Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of the moon. North on Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across) is up.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera on Sept. 20, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained from a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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 imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in 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.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: November 2, 2005 (PIA 07622)
Image/Caption Information 		  Big Bangs on Tethys
PIA 07622
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