| SPACE DAILY | SPACE WAR | TERRA DAILY | MARS DAILY | SPACE MART | SPACE TRAVEL | GPS DAILY | ENERGY DAILY |
 |
Having passed closer to Tethys than the Voyager 2 spacecraft, Cassini has returned the best-ever natural color view of this icy Saturnian moon. As seen here, the battered surface of Tethys (1,060 kilometers, or 659 miles across) has a neutral hue. The image here is a mosaic of two footprints. Three images taken in the red, green and blue filters were taken to form a natural color composite. The result reveals a world nearly saturated with craters - many small craters lie on top of older, larger ones, suggesting an ancient surface. At the top and along the boundary between day and night, the moon's terrain has a grooved appearance. This moon is known to have a density very close to that of water, indicating it is likely composed mainly of water ice. Its frozen mysteries await Cassini's planned close flyby in September 2005. The view shows primarily the trailing hemisphere of Tethys, which is the side opposite the moon's direction of motion in its orbit. The image has been rotated so that north on Tethys is up. The images comprising this color view were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Oct. 28, 2004, at a distance of about 256,000 kilometers (159,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. The image scale is 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) per pixel.
Breathtaking Vista of Saturn And Its Moon Tethys
This dazzling view looks beyond gigantic storms near Saturn's south pole to the small but clear disc of Tethys (1,060 kilometers, or 659 miles, across). Clouds and ribbons of gas swirl about in the planet's atmosphere in the foreground, while a tremendous chasm is visible on the icy moon. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Oct. 18, 2004, at a distance of 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 61 degrees. The view is in wavelengths of visible red light centered at 619 nanometers. The image scale is 23 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel. Related Links Cassini-Huygens mission at JPL Cassini imaging team SpaceDaily Search SpaceDaily Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express 
Saturn's Rhea - A Real Shiner
Pasadena CA (JPL) Nov 23, 2004Saturn's moon Rhea shows off the moon equivalent of a black eye - a bright, rayed crater near its eastern limb. Rhea is about half the size of Earth's moon. At 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across, it is the second-largest moon orbiting Saturn. |
|
