CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Ices

Tethys appears to be in between two sets of rings, but it's just a trick of geometry. The rings are actually above Tethys and their shadows appear on Saturn below Tethys.

Tethys (660 miles or 1062 kilometers across), one of Saturn's medium-sized moons, is mostly composed of ice, similar to the rings of Saturn. Ices are rare in the warmer inner solar system but at Saturn's distance from the Sun, the temperature is so low that ices function much like rocks do on Earth and therefore make up much of the bodies in the distant reaches of our system.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Tethys. North on Tethys is up and rotated 1 degree to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 23, 2015.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 40,000 miles (65,000 kilometers) from Tethys. Image scale is 2 miles (4 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. 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 Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Released: February 8, 2016 (PIA 18355)
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PIA 18355
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Alliance Member Comments
NeKto (Feb 8, 2016 at 6:16 PM):
I like it.