Titan and Tethys

The Cassini spacecraft watches a pair of Saturn's moons, showing the hazy orb of giant Titan beyond smaller Tethys.

In the foreground of the image, Ithaca Chasma can be seen running roughly north-south for more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) on Tethys. See Steep Scarps for a closer view. Titan's detached, high-altitude haze layer and north polar hood are also visible here. See Titan's Hazes and Haze Layers on Titan to learn more.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing sides of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) and Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across).

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 18, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 55 degrees. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 55 degrees. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Titan and 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Tethys.

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