Media Information

 
 
 
Collection:
NASA Planetary Photo Journal Collection
Title:
Tethys and Titan
Original Caption Released with Image:
Cassini looks toward Tethys and its great crater Odysseus, while at the same time capturing veiled Titan in the distance (at left).

Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is shrouded in a thick, smog-like atmosphere in which many small, potential impactors burn up before hitting the moon's surface. Crater-pocked Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) has no such protective layer, although even a thick blanket of atmosphere would have done little good against the impactor that created Odysseus.

The eastern limb of Tethys is overexposed in this view.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 6, 2006, at a distance of approximately 4 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Titan and 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 25 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel on Titan and 16 kilometers (10 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Produced By:
Cassini Imaging Team
Mission:
Cassini
Spacecraft:
Cassini Orbiter
Target Name:
Tethys
Is a satellite of:
Saturn
Instrument:
Imaging Science Subsystem - Narrow Angle
Product Size:
750 samples x 642 lines
Primary Data Set:
Cassini
facet_what:
Crater
facet_what:
Moon
facet_what:
Saturn
facet_what:
Tethys
facet_what:
Cassini
facet_what:
Visible Light
facet_what:
Impactor
facet_what:
Titan
facet_what:
Cassini Orbiter
facet_what:
Huygens Probe
facet_what:
Cassini-Huygens
facet_what:
Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
facet_what:
Titan (Saturn Moon)
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
facet_where:
Saturn
facet_where:
Tethys
facet_where:
California
facet_where:
Washington
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
facet_where:
Washington, D.C.
Image #:
PIA07705
UID:
SPD-PHOTJ-PIA07705
orignial url:

Tethys and Titan