CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Hyperion's Pitted Surface

Hyperion's Pitted Surface
PIA 08309
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   This color view of Hyperion shows off the dark pits that cover this strangely shaped moon.

At 270 kilometers (168 miles) across, Hyperion is the largest of Saturn's irregularly shaped moons.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 10, 2006 at a distance of approximately 998,000 kilometers (620,000 miles) from Hyperion. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

[Caption updated February 12, 2008]

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 14, 2006 (PIA 08309)
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