CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Toward Melanthius

Toward Melanthius
PIA 08254
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   Cassini looks into the 245-kilometer (150-mile) wide crater Melanthius in this view of the southern terrain on Tethys. The crater possesses a prominent cluster of peaks in its center which are relics of its formation.

Notable here is a distinct boundary in crater abundance -- the cratering density is much higher in the farthest western terrain (left side of the image) than elsewhere.

North on Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across) is up and rotated 45 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately 120,000 kilometers (75,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Image scale is 715 meters (2,345 feet) 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 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: August 29, 2006 (PIA 08254)
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