Canyons’ End

The Cassini spacecraft provides an excellent view of the southernmost reaches of the great rift of Tethys -- Ithaca Chasma.

The view is centered on terrain at 43 degrees south latitude, 52 degrees west longitude. North on Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) is up and rotated 28 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 10, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 183,000 kilometers (114,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 73 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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