Odysseus and Penelope

Tethys
May 19, 2009
PIA NumberPIA11495
Language
  • english

Two large craters named after characters in Homer's Odyssey take the stage in this scene on Saturn's moon Tethys.

The crater on the right is the Odysseus crater (450 kilometers, or 280 miles across). The one on the left is Penelope, named after the wife of Odysseus. See Penelope Crater to learn more.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Tethys (1062 kilometers, or 660 miles across). North on Tethys is up and rotated 44 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 12, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 931,000 kilometers (578,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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