Odysseus Into the Dark

Odysseus impact basin lies between night and day on Tethys.

Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across), or the side that always faces away from Saturn as the moon orbits the planet. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 26, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 96 degrees. 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute